Mirror, mirror on the wall

“Love flowed like a river
Regret was the sea —
There was once a hope
That you’d understand me
Rivers start as laughing brooks
And end in muddy spreads
Suspicion and accusations
Soil all lovers’ beds...”
From Songs of the Damned by Bachchoo

The Labour Party held its annual conference in Manchester last week. The next big event in the UK’s political calendar is the general election next year. Though the Labour Party is today marginally ahead of the governing Tories in the polls, the rating of its leader Ed Miliband remains below that of David Cameron and even below that of maverick politician Nigel Farage, who leads the UK Independence Party (UKIP) which has as yet no parliamentary representation This is not very promising for young Miliband. Potential voters can’t see him as a prime ministerial figure and don’t “identify” with him. I’ve never met him but have seen him on TV and in the cartoons. They depict him as a “geek” — sheltered, young, cerebral and unfamiliar with the ways of the world. Cartoonists home in on his broad mouth which twists unevenly when he speaks — so they give him rubber lips and round eyes which seem lost in their own reverie. It’s cruel and probably undeserved but all’s fair in love and cartoons.

At the annual conference, under the guidance of image-managers, Ed attempted to look his prime-ministerial best. He wore a modest dark suit and spoke without notes for 65 minutes on Labour’s plans. It was a modest Brit version of Obama’s “Yes we can!” and brought forth British claps rather than the whoops and yells of American audiences. In summer, Ed and Cameron went about the streets in their rolled-up shirt-sleeves  attempting to win support. Image is all. Rapport with the voters is the sought-after prize. When Cameron first won the leadership of the Tory Party he was jeered at for appearing tie-less on TV and for trying to identify with the man on the Clapham Omnibus by saying “call me Dave!”

That struck people as ridiculous, as Cameron, a millionaire, married to an heiress, educated at Eton and Oxford can’t pose as the common man except in his dreams. No doubt Ed Miliband’s image-wallahs are trying for the same with a bit more “grown-upness” in the mix. Political imagery has become a distinct genre of costume styling. Can we imagine the impact of Prime Minister Modi in a top hat and tails or in a British upper-class morning coat — the sort of costume the Duke of Edinburgh wears to formal occasions? Or can we see Modi in a suit — even in the company of an Indian capitalist cabal all sporting European-tailored suits? Not really.

Narendraji has to stick to his smartly tailored Indian middle class image. For a woman politician sari and bindi and Hindi are de rigeur... The political image is part of the democratic consciousness. Kaiser Wilhelm II was always overdressed in heavy military uniforms. So were the Viceroys of India. No desire to be “one of the people”. The finest example is the man who, educated in London as a Middle Temple lawyer, cast off his tweed suits and perhaps even the hat and took to wearing hand-crafted loincloths and shawls. No real Indian peasant dressed that way, even in the early 20th century, but the image of the “naked fakir” as Churchill called him, became the most representative image of India’s freedom movement.

The political image can go very wrong. When Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s he was, in that capacity invited to pay his respects with the Queen and the leaders of other parties at the cenotaph, a monument to honour those who were killed in the World Wars. Foot turned up in a donkey jacket, a workman’s winter wear, perhaps out of absent-mindedness or out of a deliberate attempt to demonstrate proletarian contempt for dressed-up ceremonials.
The others were in tops and tails and poor Michael was pilloried and had to apologise.

And when William Hague was leader of the Tory Party he wanted to demonstrate solidarity with Britain’s black minorities and wearing a baseball cap back-to-front waded with his trophy girlfriend into the mobs of the Notting Hill (essentially West Indian sponsored) Carnival. More ridiculous than popular.