LET'S TAKE OUR CLOTHES OFF

Children get free condoms but can't go naked

into the school shower Quentin Letts wonders

what sort of sick society we are living in

A WOOSTERISH friend of mine, relishing last week's glorious comeuppance, reckoned he had the metaphor for Peter Mandelson's pratfall. 'The emperor has no clothes!' he exclaimed.

`Nah,' I replied. 'New Labour would never tolerate nudity.'

The soft Left is twitchy about nakedness. Gay sex at 16? Fine. Morning-after pills? Gimme, gimme. But show them the unclothed human form in all its lumpen luminescence and the Islingtonian elite clutch their throats.

At public schools up and down the country you can hear the sound of plumbers hammering pipes as they dismantle the bath-houses of old. The authorities have decided that communal naked bathing is no longer 'appropriate'.

The Department of Education has left boarding schools in little doubt that unless they scrap old-fashioned 'run-through' showers• and multiple-seater bath tubs — to be replaced by private cubicles — they will be considered dodgy. One school complying with the new guidelines is my alma mater, Haileybury. Not long ago I bumped into the Master of Haileybury. `Ah, Letts,' he said, 'you'll be delighted to hear that the old shower block is being ripped out and modernised.'

But this was rotten news. The bathhouse, with its long line of showers, deep tubs and tall-tapped basins, had been magnificent. After rugger matches it would fill with steam and the whiff of Coal Tar soap and Vosene. It was a grand, echoing place for singsongs, and I was never aware of any Worsthorne/Mellyesque fumblings. That bath-house was a loud, companionable cavern where boys, aged 13 to 18, happily sluiced the dirt from their pores, made a splash, and strolled around utterly unconcerned about their nudity.

The current angst about child abuse, fuelled almost every week by handwringing new surveys, has made parents fearful of the odd bared bum. My family used to run a West Country prep school, where for decades the boys swam without trunks. The swimming-pool was well out of public view and, anyway, all chaps know it's more fun to skinny-dip.

In the Eighties, my father, the headmaster, sadly had to yield to the times. Too many of the modern mums and dads were twittering. They had been brainwashed into thinking that it 'wasn't right' for little Johnny to be seen without his bathers. They had been infected by the downmarket and leftist curse of body-shyness.

The state machine, even while banging on about sex education and handing out free rubber johnnies, proselytises against nudity as though it were some dirty business practised only by pederasts and Scandinavian weirdos.

But nudity's fortunes may have taken a turn last month at Southwark Crown Court. when Vincent Bethell, 28, was cleared of 'causing a nuisance' by walking around London in the altogether. Mr Bethell, who towards the end of proceedings was feeling the chill, is thought to be the first defendant to have been tried in the raw. The man's a hero.

The court stenographers may have needed reviving afterwards with smelling-salts. The media, however, loved it. They chased Mr Bethell and his goose pimples out into the street where, holding his clothes in an HM Prison Service plastic bag and speaking through chattering teeth, he gave an impromptu press conference. Having said his piece, he plodded home, utterly nude.

The liberal elite consider themselves wildly sophisticated, as permissive as a run of green traffic-lights. If that is so, why did Mr Bethell ever have his collar felt (or whatever it was the arresting officer grabbed)?

On film and in the public prints there has never been more flesh displayed. Nudity sells. Everything from double-glazing to ice-cream is marketed with unwrapped beauties, Page Three of the Sun looks restrained by comparison with many of the glossy magazines.

But, when real nudism rears its head, be it in school bathrooms or along the High Street in the scraggy form of Vincent Bethel the powers that be fret. Old grannies clutch their throats, pedestrians clonk into lamp-posts and parents cover their kiddies' eyes. So we are told, I suspect that more often they are simply amused.

My wife sometimes takes our two toddlers to a municipal baths in Gloucestershire. The boy is three-and-a-half and has not yet learnt to be ashamed of the way the Almighty created him. His attitude to swimming trunks is that of Tory grandees to party discipline: an optional extra, to be shed without embarrassment when convenient.

Grievous was the tutting when the little chap threw off his bathers one week and leapt in naked. Whistles were blown, fingers wagged, and Mrs Letts was given a lecture. Nudity, she was coldly informed, was 'against policy'. She did not dare tell them that she had once worked as an artist's model.

But nakedness is not the same as sexy. Nude ain't necessarily lewd. I don't know if you have ever been to a nudist beach, but they are fantastically unraunchy places. My expat uncle, a former major in the Green Jackets, used to take me to one in Spain. He frequented it not because he lusted after the sight of suncreamed Latin dugs and fat Germans' whatnots (the Germans are ardent nudists). He went primarily because it was the only beach nearby where people did not whinge about the presence of his constant companion, his dog.

Nudists tend to be pretty libertarian. (There may be a natural constituency there for William Hague's Tories, although it is unclear where canvassers could pin a blue rosette.) They take the view that it is no real business of the law to prevent them from walking around in their natural state.

Nudity is actually often less unsightly than semi-nudity. A blubbery nudist can, with imagination, be Rubenesque. It is only when a middle-aged naturist starts walking around in plastic sandals, or wears a hat, that the satire kicks in.

Yet the law remains opposed to nudity, just as, in some parts of the world, it also prevents people from smoking and drinking outdoors. Even those customary champions of liberty, the Daily Telegraph's leader writers, attacked Mr Bethel They tore him off a strip for being 'a show-off. And so he probably is.

But the best way to respond to nudity, if you dislike it, is to feign insouciance. The late Auberon Waugh, aged three, opened a door to find his step-great-great-grandmother taking her bath. Cue much agitation from the old lady, but even as a toddler Waugh had style. 'How beautiful you are looking today, Granny Grace,' he said, and withdrew.

A similar thing once happened to me. I had not locked the bathroom door and my ancient cousin, Garth Moore, theologian and late Chancellor of Gloucester and of Southwark, entered the room. Garth was unflummoxed. He stayed as long as seemed polite, inquiring about the hour for dinner, checking his fobwatch, and remarking on the unseasonal weather. With a regal wave he then retired, and nothing more was heard of the matter.

If modern Britain could master such nonchalance about the undressed human form, perhaps the admen, the Channel Five filthsmiths, Tracey Emin and even male 'show-offs' would not bother.

'Being human is not a crime!' cried Vincent Bethel!, a touch melodramatically, on hearing the jury's verdict. Interesting that it was a jury. Mr Bethel! had never found such favour with magistrates. But His Honour Judge George Bathurst Norman, a keen ornithologist, hinted that he had little time for this oddest of birds. He greeted the jury's verdict with as much enthusiasm as he might cold toast. wouldn't go away with too much of that idea,' he grunted.

Quentin Letts is parliamentary sketchwriter of the Daily Mail