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Remem­ber the Aus­tralian crick­eter Shane Warne? Remem­ber how blokey and beery and one of the care­free lads he was? A proper man’s man? Well, he’s only gone and been snared by a posh Pommy Sheila who’s turned him into a bloody pooftah!

Or at least this was the drift of today’s Tele­graph arti­cle about him, snap­pily titled: ‘Shane Warne’s remark­able trans­for­ma­tion at the hands of girl­friend Liz Hur­ley con­tin­ues’:

Dur­ing his years as a famous Aussie crick­eter, Warne had declined to take much of an inter­est in his physique or appear­ance, except for the odd foray into blond hair dye and hair “renewal”. If he grew slightly over­weight thanks to too much beer and too many meat pies, it didn’t seem to worry him.

But it seems those days are over.

Since he met and started dat­ing Hur­ley, he has mor­phed into an alto­gether more sophis­ti­cated creature.

Gone is the bad dye job and spiky hair. Gone is the pot belly. Gone are the train­ers and high-street tracksuits.

These days Warne seems to be styling him­self, or being styled, on a cross between James Bond and a Ken doll.

Thanks to the atten­tions of Hur­ley he says that he has lost 22lb and feels bet­ter than he has in years. He appears to have had his eye­brows reshaped and has even admit­ted to using mois­tur­is­ing cream, defi­antly pro­claim­ing: “Yes, I’m still a man”.

Warne, nos­ing into middle-age at 41, is a late­comer to the met­ro­sex­ual party, but he appears to be mak­ing up for lost time. For what it’s worth, I’m not sure his look is exactly work­ing for me, but it seems to be work­ing for him and that’s rather more impor­tant. After all, he ‘feels bet­ter than he has in years’.

But note how this is all ‘at the hands of’ Hur­ley. How he is ‘being styled on a cross between James Bond and a Ken Doll.’ Hur­ley in other words is play­ing dressy-uppy with her new boy toy. Who might pro­claim he’s ‘still a man’, but we know he’s been tamed, and spayed and turned all girly by Hurley.

We’ve been here before. A sim­i­lar sort of thing was said about David Beck­ham when he mar­ried Posh Spice (and not just by Sir Alex Fer­gu­son). The wicked witch had ensnared the fresh-faced Man­ches­ter United foot­baller and then, with the help of her gay chums, had drugged him with hair­spray and turned him into the sarong-wearing sissy that paraded in front of the world’s media.

A decade on, I think now most peo­ple accept that Becks is the way he is because Becks wants to be the way he is. He chose Posh as much as she chose him — prob­a­bly because he wanted to be the biggest Spice Girl in the world. If so, he succeeded.

Warne isn’t going to chal­lenge Becks for his metro crown any time soon, but he has obvi­ously decided to pret­tify him­self con­sid­er­ably. So much so that to some ret­ro­sex­ual die-hards it must almost look like a sex change (‘Yes, I’m still a man.’).

But Warne seems to enjoy feel­ing pretty. Maybe Hur­ley appealed to him pre­cisely because she knew all the right styl­ists. So he could become the beau­ti­ful met­ro­sex­ual but­ter­fly the roly-poly crick­eter was try­ing to turn into all along.

Being a blokey bloke isn’t nec­es­sar­ily about being care­free. It can be about car­ing much too much what other blokey blokes might say. Per­haps this new glam­orous, svelte Shane Warne is the ‘real’ one, rather than an inau­then­tic, Girly-Hurley-confected fake that The Tele­graph et al sug­gest he is.

In the end, con­trary to the way the media often likes to present it, met­ro­sex­u­al­ity isn’t so much about men sub­mis­sively pleas­ing women as men pleas­ing them­selves.

Which, it seems, is the scary part.