Adam Boulton is a devil who wears Prada shoes. Say no more.

Last time I looked, at a New Statesman party, the pugnacious Sky News Tory champion Adam Boulton was prowling about the perimeter of Cava-fuelled fun in a £400 pair of black leather Prada shoes. They had the distinctive red stripe cut through the back heel, and the moulded rubber soles; a sort of fusion trainer smart shoe. "Far too chic and futuristic to be British," as Melanie Rickey wrote of the designer footwear in the Independent. All very late '90s so let's be polite and call Adam a retro lover.

I wouldn't want to judge a man by his shoes, still less by his altercation with Alastair Campbell (as witnessed by TV and YouTube auds yesterday). So let's judge the shoes by the man. Why would this particular Prada hoof, with its semi-sporty allusions, with its crying out for a sleek Hugo Boss black suit, be associated with a man gravely in need of exercise? We may admire the clean lines of the shoe, so why upset symmetry with all the bumps and lumps above in the organic wearer? Is there not a basic inconsistency here? A dislocation between aspiration and actuality? Between the appearance of objectivity and the fact of partiality? [Is that last question necessary? - ed]. These shoes have an identity problem.

Adam's Pradas do not speak power; they are for posing in. He would do well to remember this, unless of course his brief is to draw more eyes to Sky News, by, er, posing. He would do better to get into the gym.