House Husbandry Giles Wood

Physiognomy is loosely defined as the art of judging character from facial characteristics. Or misjudging it perhaps.

Friends and family were baffled last summer when I fell for the features of Andrea Leadsom, but this was a face that, inexplicably, I felt I could bear to see day after day in her potential future role as prime minister. By contrast, Theresa May’s face elicited in me only the sense that I was somehow being told off through the television screen. As a ‘scoldee’ on a daily marital basis, I always identified with the police chiefs in the days when they received their public tongue-lashings from home secretary May.

But while May’s features seem set in disapproval, Leadsom’s suggest a state of perpetual pleasant surprise. It’s the innocent happy look of someone who has just won the tombola prize of a bottle of Gordon’s Gin at the golf club coffee morning. Surprised to be chosen as a candidate, then surprised to be sacked, then her eyebrows went through the roof when ‘Tizzy’ May crowned her with what George Monbiot called the ‘punishment posting’ (since she was bound to do the job badly) of secretary of state for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

I often agree with Monbiot, yet so overriding is this conflation of Leadsom with happiness that I can forgive her anything – even the first question she asked on becoming minister of state for energy at the Department of Energy and Climate Change in 2015: ‘Is climate change real?’

Suddenly I made the connection. Leadsom’s agreeable features connect me directly to a character deeply evocative of childhood happiness. She is a dead ringer for Pong-ping the Pekingese dog in the Rupert Bear stories.

A career in banking is not the best introduction to the world of fishing, farming, floods and protection of the natural world but as she gave a press briefing outside the Leadsom family home, a lovely stone house with mullioned windows, I found myself reflecting that it must be in Nutwood village not far from Nutwood Manor, where Ottoline Otter resides.

I imagined Ottoline and Pong-ping heading by train on their annual seaside holiday to Sandy Bay or Rocky Bay where they would join Rupert Bear (even though a bus replacement service awaits most who opt for a staycation).

And what adventures these three might have together down on the seabed with mermen and mermaids, collecting mysterious beads which on closer inspection turn out to be none other than the microbeads now banned by Pong-ping herself in response to a campaign by the Daily Mail.

But Rupert begins to yawn with all that fresh air, and At last the family, all three Sit down and have a lovely tea. But how much of this infantilisation is self-sought and how much of it thrust upon us? Last time I went to London a voice on the Tube boomed out to me that it would be wise if I carried a bottle of water and drank it if I felt hot. Meanwhile, Baroness Greenfield has told the House of Lords that social media has rendered the 21st century mind ‘infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity’.

So why doesn’t Mrs May now reassure her infantilised public further by bringing back Michael Gove into the heart of government? Not only does Gove’s physiognomy suggest a great mind cogitating, but as a Rupert Bear character he’s a shoe-in for Bingo the Brainy Pup, who invents things and generally makes things work.

The time has come to take the heat out of the immigration debate and divert attention towards the greatest challenge the planet faces. According to our own Sir David Attenborough, ‘There is no major problem facing our planet that would not be easier to solve if there were fewer people; and no problem that does not become harder — and ultimately impossible to solve — with ever more.’

And who better to address it than the clever Bingo? As secretary of state for population, he could commission scientific and environmental research to allow us to set the goal of an optimal population for the UK. We could lead the way. Bingo!