Jeremy Corbyn’s white-tie get-up is straight outta Downton | Jonathan Jones

The Labour leader’s appearance at the Buckingham Palace banquet in honour of Xi Jinping is not so much conformist as surreal – and projects an image of virtue

Jeremy Corbyn in white tie looks like a character straight out of the Edwardian age. It’s the white beard that does it. Pictured walking smartly past a row of oil paintings at last night’s Buckingham Palace banquet for China’s president, Xi Jinping, Corbyn resembles a figure from a painting by John Singer Sargent, the supremely stylish recorder of high society before the first world war. Who is this distinguished and wiry man resplendent in court dress? Is it Bulstrode of the Foreign Office who organised that jolly standoff with the Kaiser in east Africa? Or diamond magnate Edgar Sponge?

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