The election hasn’t even started yet and I’m losing enthusiasm. I say this as a man who is usually enthusiastic, and yet still quite badly informed about politics – a sort of male Carol Vordermann on Question Time but not a woman and definitely not so Daily Mail.
What’s really getting to me are these earnest bloody interviews and documentaries where Gordon and David try to tell me how they’re down to earth and human and just like me. I don’t care! I want to know what services you’re going to cut to pay off the deficit because, if you’re like me on that issue, you’re bloody clueless .
Why do we need to know what a politician is like in his personal life? George Bush is apparently lovely to speak to face to face but that doesn’t mean the man should ever have been installed in the White House for eight years.
I don’t care how Gordon Brown met his wife or where he proposed. I don’t care that Samantha Cameron feels that despite the fact David’s a bit messy he’s never let her down. Well I do care a bit what Samantha Cameron said because she looks pretty and seems really sweet…oh christ, the bastards have got me!
Maybe I shouldn’t get angry with the politicians. The reason they have to play this PR game is that the electorate can’t be bothered to properly investigate their policies. So Tory politicians can get away with pure propaganda like calling the current economic nightmare ‘Brown’s recession’ (Wow, what a coincidence that his recession coincided with a massive worldwide downturn), or Labour politicians exploiting Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status while not mentioning their own non-dom backers. I don’t see why being a non-dom is so bad. It’s to do with not wanting to be spanked by prostitutes isn’t it?
I just can’t help thinking that all this personality politics is terribly misleading . I bet Hitler and Eva Braun could have done a lovely interview with Piers Morgan or Trevor McDonald. Trevor still wouldn’t have asked any difficult questions. Hitler smiling gently while stroking his beloved Alsatian and explaining how he may lose his temper but only because he cares so much for the Reich. Eva joking that Adolf always says he’d shoot himself before he married her…or just after anyway.
