Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

In bed with politicians

Who on earth wants to know about the leaders' children, pets, kitchens and favourite biscuits?

Who on earth wants to know about the leaders’ children, pets, kitchens and favourite biscuits?

I am sitting in the audience at Labour party conference, watching a tribute video to Gordon Brown. As Brown smiles, walks, talks, scowls and moves his limbs up and down, giving a fairly decent impersonation of a soon-to-be-discontinued toy, I have a sudden realwisation. I don’t know if Stanley Baldwin liked Murray Mints. I have never seen Winston Churchill sob on Piers Morgan’s lap, like cheese melting on toast. And I – I – I have no idea whether Clement Attlee had a nice kitchen.

Why is this? Is it because the private lives and decoration choices – the mood boards, if you will – of politicians used to be yucky, but shrouded? That, in what I call the Pre-Boden Era, no politician felt the need to go fishing topless and be photographed doing it?

But that was in the Olden Days. Now they hurl their lifestyles and even their fecundity at us in a sweet-smelling blur – half soap opera, half advertising without the small print. So this year I have watched David Cameron jog, eat, kiss his wife and children, and eat some more. I have seen him go on holiday and come back again. I have heard him say why he loves his wife and – in a separate media opportunity – heard why, and how, she loves him back. Sometimes I think I am living in their kitchen. Or maybe it is Nick Clegg’s kitchen. He has a lovely kitchen too – and don’t I just know it. Sometimes I think I am actually in bed with them all. Thank God they do not have a dog.

And if you are reading this, Cameron spin-doctor, forget it.

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