Party chiefs throw kitchen sink at poll
LONDON, May 2, (AFP): Kitchens have been at the heart of Britain’s general election campaign, with party leaders giving confessional, off-thecuff interviews as they shuffle between the tea cups and the toaster.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband and Deputy PM Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats have all been peeling vegetables and doing the washing up in setpiece interviews with the major broadcasters.
In the run-up to Thursday’s knife-edge election, British voters have watched “Dave” lovingly wash his cherry tomatoes while preparing the family salad, and “Ed” drinking tea in his ostentatiously modest “kitchenette”.
Meanwhile “Nick”, joined by his Spanish lawyer wife Miriam, was filmed sipping a glass of white wine while a paella simmered away in the background.
Rigorously
Each time, the ritual was carefully staged, the relaxed setting rigorously observed. Pullovers and shirt sleeves abound. The children are not far away. A show of real life, neatly arranged for the television cameras.
“It’s more and more important for politicians to show that they are like ordinary people,” said Nick Turnbull, a politics lecturer from the University of Manchester.
“Male candidates in the kitchen is exactly what this is about.”
In a country gripped by a relatively new-found passion for cooking driven by celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, the kitchen interview is all about the leaders showing off a modern man image.
It also ties in with highly prevalent television formats.
“The kitchen also relates to the high-profile success of the celebrity chef cookery show,” said Dominic Wring, a reader in political communication at Loughborough University.
Only Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party, has opted to get out of the house, to be filmed in his more regular environs.
“He’s in the pub with his pints,” Turnbull told AFP.
“He wouldn’t be in the kitchen, because their (UKIP’s) voters are older men, more traditional, not middle class.”
Turnbull said that for the three main party leaders, the kitchen image was important in projecting that modern man image out to the middle classes, “the main class to win for the parties for 20 years now” — and female voters.
Interviewed standing by his oven, Clegg insisted it was his wife who wore the trousers round their house.
And when one presenter was stunned by the “immaculate” nature of Nicola Sturgeon’s “show home” kitchen, the Scottish National Party leader said: “I had my husband up most of last night cleaning it before you arrived! It’s not always so tidy.”
Even before prime minister he became
in 2010, Cameron launched his own “WebCameron” channel on YouTube in which he appeared with an apron on, doing the dishes while spelling out his political philosophy.
But never before now has the kitchen played such a role in electoral strategy.
“A kitchen is personal enough but you still can exercise some control,” said Philip Habel, an expert in political communication and political behaviour at the University of Glasgow.
“The kitchen communicates a warm and a family environment, a relaxed environment,” he told AFP.
Staying in the safety of home has actually proved a useful tactic in this election campaign, where candidates have gone out of their way to avoid the risk of meeting voters, who might ask embarrassing questions or provoke a fatal gaffe.
But even with food, leaders have to exercise caution. Cameron insisted on eating a hot dog with a knife and fork — but then given the mockery Miliband faced after struggling to chew a bacon sandwich, it’s not hard to see why.
Ridiculed for the sandwich face-pulling while out on the road, the Labour leader was also pilloried after his kitchen interview.
One Daily Mail commentator branded the kitchen “bland, functional, humourless, cold and about as much fun to live in as a Communist era housing block in Minsk” — and triggered an inquest.
“Revealed: Ed’s two-kitchen secret”, announced The Times.
The “sterile little box”, it turned out, was the nanny’s smaller, secondary “kitchenette” in the Milibands’ plush north London home, with the expansive main kitchen kept away from the cameras.
But all the kitchen sink drama seems to be turning the voters’ stomachs.
A recent ComRes survey found 71 percent had no interest at all in neither the candidates’ kitchens or home life.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives and the opposition Labour party have been polling within a few percentage points of each other throughout the campaign, both hovering at about 34 percent support.
If neither party moves ahead in the final week, then neither will secure a parliamentary majority and will have to negotiate with smaller parties in order to govern.
Difficult
The exact make-up of the House of Commons remains difficult to predict, however, due to Britain’s “winner takes all” system that means votes are decided not on the overall popular vote but on the individual outcomes in each of the 650 constituencies.
The fragmentation of British politics also makes life harder for the pollsters, as voters are increasingly ditching tribal loyalties and could change their minds on the day.
In the 2010 election, the polls were largely accurate in predicting the Conservatives’ share of the vote, but all underestimated Labour’s support and overestimated the third party, the Liberal Democrats.
This year one certainty is that the Scottish nationalists will win most, if not all, of the 59 seats in Scotland, up from just six in the 2010 vote.