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By the time they stop being mad, politicians are the right age for the House

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 17th October 2007

Political youth, though, is puzzling. For months now, I have been working on a theory to try to understand why the Conservative party is in such terrible trouble. Obviously, it has developed problems within the past couple of weeks, what with the Conservative party suddenly not being in trouble at all. Still, that is not my fault. I was keen to figure out why, despite being only a few years older than I am, the new young stars of the Tories appear to be so utterly unlike me or anybody I know. I’m public school. I’m Oxbridge. My Facebook account should be bursting with George Osbornes. Yet until I briefly met Osborne himself I had never met any. The many Tories I know today have emerged, carefully, over the past couple of years. As students, they would have been more likely to declare themselves keen connoisseurs of whalemeat.

For the entirety of the 1990s, in other words, one simply did not admit to being a Conservative in polite, youthful society. Thus, runs my theory, the only people who did were people who were either too mad or too posh to know it was wrong. A case overmade, perhaps, but I hope you will see a kernel of truth in it. Spun differently, it could work on the other side. Left or Right, young politicians are not normal. If they were, they would not be young politicians.

It need not matter, being young and mad. Many of us grow peculiar as we age. Politicians, for the most part, do the opposite. William Hague, at 46, has come on leaps and bounds since his early years. These days, you can almost imagine him using shops. Yet his clock is ticking. Also, unusually for clocks, it is shrinking. By the time he is middle-aged, and as normal, say, as Iain Duncan Smith, he will be an obsolete old veteran. Just like poor old Sir Ming.

It is a truism to state that the younger generation will one day be the older generation, but it bears thinking about. One day, David Cameron will be stout and goutish, and start saying arch things about his successors before party conferences. Ed Miliband will struggle to send a holo-text on his new mobile phone. Patches of pink will start appearing in the golden thatch of Boris Johnson. These will be men in their prime. Perhaps they will be 55. Finally, they will hardly be mad at all.

What will they all do? Will the back benches even be an option? By then, constituencies will be seeking teenagers as candidates, Emily Benns of 17. The foreign secretary will be 23, and looking out over his shoulder, nervously, for a younger man. ‘He’s past it!’ we will all crow, of a man who loses a Liberal Democrat leadership election at 31. Pretty soon our children will be voting at 16, despite the bulk of our population edging towards their pensions.

And where will they all go? The Camerons and Osbornes and Balls and Milibands and all the rest. All that knowledge and experience and time spent learning how not to be mad, and nobody will even think of voting for them because they don’t know how to work the 2025 equivalent of an iPod.

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David Doughan

October 21st, 2007 5:43pm Report this comment

Sir: Hugo Rifkind is understandably incredulous at bank robbers in Ferrar using bicycles for their getaway. Actually, this is not quite as bizarre as it first seems: Ferrara is as flat as a piadina, and most Ferrarese are cyclists. While this conjures up a picture of Amsterdam or Copenhagen, it has to be remembered that Ferrara is in Italy, and Italians ride the bikes in much the same way as they drive their cars. So it would come naturally to a Ferrarese robber to escape by pedal power. Yours, etc. David Doughan 120 Kenley Road London SW19 3DW

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