Love him or hate him, he knows what he’s doing
It looks like it took all of five minutes to shoot – and perhaps that is the reason why Boris Johnson’s first election video has been racking up viewers in the millions.
The Prime Minister was caught “on his tea break” answering 12 questions, ranging from, “Why are we having this election?” to, “Sunday roast or fish ’n’ chips?”
His decision to go for the latter sparked a flurry of online speculation about the Tories’ electoral ambitions in fishing towns. Incidentally, this is a more than usually silly theory, because most of the cod we eat is imported.
The thousands of comments left under the video captured two predominant reactions. The first was: “Love it! Nice one Boris.” The second: “Oh Boris you’re so down to earth”, “Ah, such a loveable rogue”, “Oooh, he also likes music. I myself, a regular person, like music”, and “Let’s totally put Brexit in the microwave!”
As a sceptical political observer, I confess that my reaction was closer to the latter. But it doesn’t actually matter. The originality of the effort (in politics at least) ensured it was going to get watched, resulting in exactly the Marmite effect that Mr Johnson has on people more generally (as the video revealed, he is, fittingly, a fan of Marmite).
Then, yesterday on BBC Breakfast, Naga Munchetty asked exactly the question that seems to fox the Prime Minister’s detractors so much. “Why are you relatable?”
Now this is precisely the sort of Mckinsey-esque question that a regular politician would probably use to “personalise” their story with some preprepared narrative about their journey and empathy for the public, achieving precisely the opposite effect from the one they intend.
Mr Johnson gave it a go, but his heart wasn’t in it. At last, after several attempts and some footage of him mangling a shop floor with a mop, he gave up: “Am I relatable? I haven’t the faintest idea. It seems to me the most difficult psychological question.”
There it is, in a nutshell: a normal person’s response to a question most of us would have no idea how to answer.
The shops are full of Christmas decorations, but the options on offer are getting more and more cosmopolitan. The other day I was surprised to spot a colourful bauble depicting a sacred cow and another in the shape of a Ganeshlike figure.
At first I found it bizarre. And then I remembered that I myself, a largely secular Jewish person, will soon be buying a Christmas tree. This is what it means to have a national culture, even if it means bending some religious rules.