Our governments should be fronted by actors (Ronald Reagan showed the way)

Alas, poor Dave. The chap just can’t win.

He has papered over the gaping holes in all his policies without the focus groups being any the wiser.

Prospective voters don’t seem to mind his firm commitment to destroying the institution of marriage.

They turn a blind eye on his economic policy with its phoney, and predictably catastrophic, focus on turning us into a nation of estate agents. We’ll all grow rich by selling houses to one another – until the bubble bursts and 2008 returns with a much bigger bang.

But since the implosion isn’t likely before the next election, Dave doesn’t mind that. And neither do the focus groups.

They even let Dave get away with one of the most pathetic foreign-policy fiascos ever suffered by a British PM, when his clamorous commitment to bombing Syria was quickly replaced by a craven agreement to let Putin call the shots.

The focus groups winced but swallowed – as they did the never-ending list of promises Dave has broken. I mean, does anyone even remember his Big Society?

And yet Dave is on course to losing the next election because he’s out of touch with women. ‘He does bugger-all for women like me,’ said one former Tory voter. Actually he also does bugger-all for men like me, for reasons I’ve outlined.

But what are the women’s reasons? They must be compelling and numerous: after all, Dave has managed to convert a 5% lead among 2010 woman voters into a 13% lead for Labour among the same group.

Apparently, the strongest reason is that Dave is posh. He has the gall to have been educated at Eton and Oxford, rather than at a comprehensive in a bad part of town and South Thames College. This automatically means he can’t possibly understand today’s women. Even though he too went to Oxford, Ed Miliband does much better with girls, and he’s not even that handsome.

I’m disappointed with Dave. Fair enough, what’s done is done, he can’t undo his educational qualifications. But can’t he do a better job pretending to be a man of the people? This is after all the only ironclad requirement for electoral success these days.

It’s not as if he hasn’t tried. Calling himself a voter-friendly Dave rather than a toffee-nosed David was a good start, but clearly more work needs to be done. Pronouncing his name as Dive would show willing but it can’t stop there.

Dave ought to make more of being married to a tattooed woman, thereby reducing the gap between himself and council estate dwellers. Referring to Sam as ‘me trouble’ wouldn’t hurt either, as in “me trouble ‘ad ten Mahatmas down the pub, got elephant’s and wallaced on the rory.” (For non-British readers unfamiliar with Cockney rhyming slang, trouble and strife = wife; Mahatma Gandhi = brandy; elephant’s trunk = drunk; Wallace and Grommit = vomit; Rory O’Moore = floor.)

Of course it’s not just the lines but also the delivery that matters, and this must be the hitch. Dive would be employing all the lexical tools I’ve suggested, and then some, if he felt he could pull it off phonetically.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to possess even the modest talent Tony Blair displayed in that area when he began to drop his aitches in mixed company. At times Tony forgot in which company he should do so and in which he shouldn’t, but he got top marks for trying.

This brings me to the kernel of my proposal. Since women voters demand downmarket sensibilities from politicians, and since Dave doesn’t seem to be able to fake those convincingly enough, the Tory party should put an actor at its head.

Look at the sterling job Ralph Fiennes (the blighter even pronounces his Christian name as ‘Rafe’ – they don’t come much posher than that) and Sir Ben Kingsley did. The first played a London gangster in the film In Bruges, the second in Sexy Beast.

With some help from a speech coach, both men sounded convincing enough as Cockney speakers to fool foreign viewers, if not quite authentic enough to make Ray Winstone or Bob Hoskins seek a career change.

Why not cut to the chase and appoint one of the four men, or better still a professional impressionist like Rory Bremner, as leader of the Conservative party? In reality they’d probably do a better job than Dave-Dive – it’s hard to do a worse one. More important, they’d run away with the top prize in the perception sweepstakes, and that’s all that really matters to our comprehensively educated electorate.

This isn’t to say that some clever chaps couldn’t back up the chosen actor with policy advice. That kind of arrangement worked gangbusters for Reagan who wasn’t quite compos mentis in his second term. So his Chief of Staff James Baker ran the Reagan administration while Ronnie was wheeled out to deliver folksy asides  whenever needed.

Djahmean, Dive? It’s the tin tack for you, me old China. Or, in your parlance, you’re hereby sacked, old boy.

 


 

 

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