If ‘bogey man’ Ed did this, we’d all be very sniffy...
HAVE you ever wondered what happened to the vegetables so wantonly sacrificed in the BBC’s carefully stagemanaged TV advertisement for David Cameron?
Keen-eyed viewers will have noted the Prime Minister twice giving his nose a jolly good wipe with the back of his hand, as he chopped away at his groceries. Just imagine what would have happened to Ed Miliband if he’d done that: action replays and front-page pictures for days.
But Ed is a target, and Dave isn’t.
So I very much hope that the poor vegetables, so unhygienically treated, ended in the slop bucket, rather than being fed to the Camerons’ innocent children.
But there were other vegetables present. What did the BBC reporter, James Landale, think he was doing, joining in this shameless performance by subserviently tending to a lettuce? He might as well have knelt and done up Mr Cameron’s shoes for him, or some other fagging duty.
If Tory High Command want to make a TV commercial for their leader, in which he pretends to be the normal bloke he most certainly is not (normal people don’t become Prime Ministers, trust me) , then good luck to them. But the BBC should play no part in such fictions.
The kitchen in which they stood was not a normal kitchen in a normal home. Leave aside the armed guards outside. Can we doubt that every action was choreographed, and that every object in it was carefully placed to promote an image? What’s more, you and I pretty much paid for it.
For nearly eight years, in a piece of cheek still widely unknown to the public, the far-- from-poor Camerons claimed £1,700 a month, tax-free, in Parliamentary expenses to pay the mortgage interest on this, their Oxfordshire village home.
This made Mr Cameron (who had another home only 70 miles away) one of the highest claimers of housing expenses in Parliament. While it’s good to see inside the house the taxpayer provided, at last, mightn’t a question on this subject have been in order, under the circumstances? Instead the First Lord of the Treasury was asked if it was a handicap to be posh.
Meanwhile, over on the equally impartial Channel 4 and Sky, Jeremy Paxman got clean away with asking Ed Miliband the insulting and patronising question: ‘Are you all right, Ed?’
I was pleased to see that Mr Miliband gave as good as he got. But is this what politics has come to? It seems so.