Frankie goes to Downing Street

On the day Andy Burnham became prime minister, my female friends had eyes only for his wife’s dress. The lilac Victoria Beckham gown that Marie-France van Heel wore to No. 10 on Monday was the wrong shape or color, they said. The fit didn’t flatter. It was too expensive at £890 in a cost-of-living crisis. Then there was the scraped-back hair, a style that’s satisfying to wear but harder to photograph. Oh, but we are awful! All these years complaining that prime ministers’ wives are judged so harshly on their looks, and here we are, the ones doing the judging. I sighed — before admitting that they were only saying what I was thinking. Who, then, is the real van Heel? We all know that she’s Dutch and also lived in Belgium when young. She met her future husband after coming to study at Cambri