Politics (look out!)

Chewing momentarily over the coverage of the Lib Dem conference, I realised that all Ming Campbell has done for me is re-enforce a worrying realisation that in politics surface does matter - a lot. I'm all for green taxes, devolution, getting out of bed with Dubya etc., but I'm afraid Ming, for all his sporty past, looks like he smells of wee a bit. There, I've said it. I also know that policy matters more than jokes, but can I vote for a man who stood in front of his entire party a delivered this line in the middle of his keynote speech:

"A great grey depression that spins around sucking everything into its centre. And it's name? Hurricane Gordon."

Bullseye! I can just hear the creak of conference hall chairs that must have followed that stunning one-liner. Did he actually write that? Did he see his advisors look uncomfortably at the floor as he ran it by them? Surely no-one with an ounce of human empathy would subject people to such buttock-clenching humiliation. I can really see him charm his way down the corridors of global power with a pocket full of lines like that one.

Of course 'Hurricane' Gordon (oh, le mot juste!) has an image problem too. I don't care what music my politicians listen to, but when he came out with that line about listening to the Arctic Monkeys on his ipod over breakfast fifteen years of respect for the man began to evaporate noticeably. Why? a) because it is clearly a lie and he showed he can't lie properly (so he'll be a rubbish PM), and b) it was hideously undignified in the uncle-dancing-at-a-wedding sense. He might as well have turned up to a press conference in leather pants.

What can you do? Obviously you don't go all Tory (and I can't begin to get the 'public school shit' charm Cameron is supposed to possess), but you don't want to go down the 'it's all bollocks innit' route. I ended up swallowing my pride and voting Labour two years ago because my MP is a Brownite - and now he turns out to be not just an old bloke in leather pants, but an old bloke who lies about being an old bloke in leather pants. I did want to vote Lib Dem, but - in keeping with their 'who gives a toss about appearances' policy - they put up Edmund Blackadder as our candidate.

Edmund Blackadder Our candidate

Okay, that's a bit mean: I'm sure she's a lovely woman. However, this did make me wonder how just many Lib Dem MPs model themselves on comic characters - and I realised that Simon Hughes was Jeffrey Fairbanks from Hi-De-Hi



There's even a rather unnerving Dumbledore thing going on with Ming...



A strange bunch - either getting through a case of whisky a night, shagging rent boys or dressing up as passe comedy characters. Call me superficial, but if a pub-rant political pseud like me can be put off by the fact that the party with the least worst policies is also a bunch of weirdy oddballs who would be laughed out of the Bilderberg Group before they'd said hello, then I suspect plenty of other people will feel the same. Which, of course, means they can have all the good ideas they want, but they'll never get to implement them. We need more surface, guys. Sad, but true.