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Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 27th May 2009

If you think politicians are mad, wait till celebrities are running the country

Clearly they should just have a different Speaker every time. Like on Have I Got News For You? since they sacked Angus Deayton. Do you remember the one with Sir Trevor Mcdonald? Brilliant. Because we never saw it coming, did we? We all thought, well, they just need to find the right man, somebody with a suitable terse wit, and who isn’t going to appear on the front of the News of The World in the sort of grainy photographs that one now vaguely expects to show a young George Osborne. But no. Turned out you didn’t need a full-time frontman after all. Give them the jokes and a child could do it. Even Neil Kinnock.

So why not do the same with the great topical news quiz of SW1? A different celebrity every day. For some reason, the first one that springs to mind is Johnny Vegas. You know him? Comedian. Regional accent. Always sounds wasted. I’ve a very clear mental picture of him in the Speaker’s chair. No, hold on, my mistake, that’s still Michael Martin. Ah well, same basic idea. Plenty of them could do it. Terry Wogan, Richard Madeley, Sir Trev again. You want celebrities in politics, that’s their place. Speaking, not doing. No power. Just a shiny coat and a lacy cravat.

There’s this worrying idea doing the rounds, you see, that celebrities would be good in power, because they are somehow ‘in touch with the public’. Where does it come from? The moon-faced Esther Ranzten, possibly. How normal can you be if you’ve been on telly since 1968? When she talks about ‘the public’, she plainly means ‘the owners of talking dogs, and crazy people who stop me in the street to tell me they’ve found a radish shaped like a penis’. God, she’s not doing the Diary this week, is she? Guys? Let me know, eh? I’ll ditch the ‘moon-faced’ bit, at least.

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Russell

May 28th, 2009 4:10pm Report this comment

You're about "the public". When things went her way last week, Joanna Lumley claimed that she had "the whole country" on her side. No I bloody wasn't!

The problem with celebrities is that they seem to have acquired a strong sense of moral superiority, perhaps from being paid bucketloads of money to produce what is mostly crap. And they keep this superiority, despite the fact that most of them depend on the tabloids to maintain their profiles. Or eating bugs in the jungle.

But maybe SW1 is missing a trick: think of how full the benches would be the day that Abi Titmus is Speaker...

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