Perhaps Wintour's many run-ins at the hands of anti-fur campaigners, who harry her continually with protests and practical "jokes", or the criticism she has received for continuing to carry tobacco ads, had blunted her judgment. Promoting fur and conniving at encouraging smoking? An odd set of interests for one of the Democrats' leading presidential campaign fundraisers.
When in March 2011 American Vogue ran Joan Juliet Buck's profile of "Syria's First Lady", Asma al-Assad, under the headline "A Rose in the Desert", there was media mayhem. Buck did not help herself by explaining that Mrs Assad was "extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore qualified to be in Vogue". Yet the article was not pulled from the Vogue website for a whole year. Buck lost her Vogue contract and has drawn most of the flak, but it was Wintour who instigated and approved the piece, including the cringing headline and the botched damage limitation exercise. Any other editor would have been fired. When challenged, Wintour defended herself by claiming that, back in 2010, when the interview was set up, "like many at that time, we were hopeful that the Assad regime would be open to a more progressive society". As Obama's ambassador at the Court of St James, she would need better political advisers than whoever told her that.
Her cold-blooded insouciance enables her to emerge from every media storm somehow stronger. She has a rare ability to draw blood without chipping a fingernail. In 2005 it was rumoured —only rumoured — that fashion designers who appeared "as themselves" in the film version of The Devil Wears Prada would be airbrushed from Vogue for ever. The rumour was denied. Wintour herself — there is no denying that she can be gracious — seemed to receive the film like a good sport, even wearing Prada to the première.
But, despite flurries of name-checks, just one ageing designer appears on screen in a film which elevated the nuclear Wintour legend to a new height, without denting her power by a pin's-breadth. The fashion world is driven by rumour and fear. These forces are incarnate in "Miss Anna" herself.
