I think David Cameron’s ‘Gillian Duffy moment’ came in this election campaign when he forgot which football team he supported. Having told us many times, always unconvincingly, that he was a lifelong Aston Villa supporter, he announced yesterday to a bemused press conference that he wished everyone supported West Ham. Cameron’s response today was even more bizarre, “it is just one of those things.”
Well, of course it is. It could happen to anyone. I can just imagine the 11,000 Gasheads who turned up to watch their beloved Bristol Rovers stick seven goals past lowly Alfreton accidentally turning up at Ashton Gate next weekend to cheer on Bristol City’s League One championship procession. It would be “just one of those things”, wouldn’t it?
And there is a golden rule for anyone who finds themselves in a hole: stop digging. But no, Cameron today makes it worse: “I don’t know what happened to me…I haven’t been for years and years.” As my loyal reader knows, I haven’t been to watch Bristol Rovers for nearly three years but I haven’t forgotten the name of the club I have supported since before I was legally allowed to drink alcohol, or in fact since when I consumed it illegally, for that matter).
What is it with these politicians who try to be what they are not? Why didn’t Cameron just admit that he is not a particularly great football fan after all? There’s no law that says you need to behave like everyman down the pub. Being born into his background was not his fault, so why pretend to embrace a culture in which you are not really interested? I wouldn’t think any less of him, but then I couldn’t anyway.
In the immortal words of Shania Twain, it don’t impress me much. People rightly hate politicians (actually, I could end the sentence there, but just hang on) for all sorts of reasons but one of them is surely when they pretend to be what they aren’t. So more politicians like Kenneth Clarke, Alan Johnson, David Davis, Dennis Skinner and, yes, John Prescott, please, who are what they are, say what they think and just occasionally rock the boat that to my mind needs rocking much more often. You might not always like what they have to say and in Prescott’s case the words might not always come out in the right order, but you know it will usually be the truth as they see it and not as some spin doctor has imagined it.
