An amazing revelation in today’s Observer. Apparently, David Cameron has been “whining like a schoolboy” about the Daily Mirror‘s coverage of the Conservatives. He’d requested a clear the air meeting with the Mirror‘s editor, Richard Wallace, which backfired when Cameron and his flunkeys decided to compare the paper’s coverage with that of Neil Kinnock in the 80s. Wallace, it’s fair to say, found the statement disagreeable.
Whenever I look at Cameron, I have a stark visualisation of a posh public schoolboy queuing for school dinners, playing obscure sports and doing unmentionable things to digestive biscuits. His face, his persona, his accent – for me, everything about him is inseparable from his Etonian background. So thought of him stamping his foot and bleating like a little kid isn’t that difficult to imagine.
Wallace has now said he will wage “a fucking war” with Cameron (I’m hoping the expletive is purely an intensifier), after the latter revealed details of the meeting and presented Wallace as what the Observer calls “a chastised child”.
My favourite bit of Mirror on Cameron is this:
Spotty Cameron was packed off to £25,000-a-year Eton, puffing on wacky baccy rather than learning Latin. Then it was off to Oxford’s dreaming spires, where he bought a silly £1,200 tail coat, pratting around as an Edwardian gentleman in the restricted gene pool that is the Bullingdon Club.
All, I think Dave will find, entirely factually accurate.
Perhaps he should try developing a sense of humour. It’s highly unlikely that a Mirror reader is going to vote Tory, so an attempt to influence the paper’s editor is bound to be an entirely fruitless exercise.
In fact, if I was Cameron, I’d play up to my toffee-nosed Etonian background. The concept of voter deference, whereby working class voters vote for posh people because they believe the rich and privileged are better equipped to govern, is a well known one – and perhaps the best chance Cameron has got of beating Gordon Brown, who, let’s face it, is a bit of a weirdo.
The Conversation {1 comments}
I was once told by my politics tutor at university that the notion of false consciousness was a myth, and, further, it was insulting and patronising to the working classes.
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