You don’t expect people to take their political inspiration from Jon Bon Jovi. Or at least I don’t. Maybe that’s terribly presumptuous of me. Maybe some people do. ‘Tommy used to work on the docks/ Union’s been on strike/ He’s down on his luck, it’s tough/ so tough.’ Maybe that’s what got Tony Blair up in the morning. A decade of New Labour, ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’. It’s not entirely impossible, although I did always think that New Jersey’s most accessible rock star was more about bouffant hair and catchy guitar solos than hardcore political philosophy. Mind you, I always thought much the same about Tony Blair.
He was in a colour supplement this weekend, anyway (Bon Jovi, not Blair) wearing what seemed to be a newish hat as the head of his own philanthropic foundation. So there’s politics there, obviously, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was something he said about Barack Obama. ‘I think the world of this President,’ he said, ‘and I’m watching him go grey in nine months.’
He was right, of course. (Maybe he always is. Maybe ‘bad medicine’ really is good for you, counter-intuitive as it might seem.) That close-cropped fluff on the President’s skull has indeed swiftly faded from a youthful black to a tarnished silver since he came to office. To be fair, it has periodically grown dark again, but that never lasts long. Either way, I’m guessing that when a man dyes his hair, Jon Bon Jovi can tell. They’re the same age, him and Barack Obama. A year ago they looked it. Now, not so much.
Me, I started going grey earlier this year, after we had a baby. Not wildly grey, just a smattering in the beard and the odd streak up top. My hunch would be that being President of the United States is probably a bit more stressful. If he wins a second term, what’s Obama going to look like by the time my daughter is eight? I keep thinking of what happened to Tony Blair over the years: the way his face and hair went all monotone and Cliff Richard, the way his shiny skin started to shrink around his skull like a condom around a walnut, and the way that one troublesome front tooth started retreating back into his mouth, as though somebody had told it there might be a way out. Have you ever seen one of those photo sequences that show what happens to people’s faces when they start regularly taking crystal meth? Leading a nation seems similar.
Did you see Gordon Brown at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday? Woah. The eyes were hooded, the nose newly hooked, and he has these odd shelves building up on his cheeks. He looked older than John Major, and he’s actually almost a decade younger. It didn’t help, of course, that he was standing next to David Cameron and that Lib Dem whatsisname, him who looks like a chinless Simon Cowell. Mind you, what do you reckon Cameron will look like in five years’ time? Fat neck, hanging cheeks, very thin hair.
It made me think, anyway, just for a moment, that maybe this isn’t right. Maybe nobody can do these jobs — the jobs these jobs have become — and do them well. Maybe it’s just too much work. Ninety-two British troops have died in Afghanistan this year, and Gordon Brown has written a letter to the family of each one. There can be little excuse for spelling Jamie Janes as Janie James and you can see why his mother was upset, but maybe you just can’t write 92 decent letters in a year when you’re Prime Minister as well. I’m not saying he deserves our sympathy, that’s up to you. I’m just saying, maybe it can’t be done.
Leading a country has always been a big job, obviously, but I wonder if, latterly, it has become too big. The newer bits all seem like good ideas — 24-hour news cycles, constant expectations of transparency, incessant questions about biscuits — but maybe, at some point, we’re going to have to ask ourselves how much they actually make for good governance. Because with all that going on, as Mr Bon Jovi might put it, how you gonna keep the faith?
I have no ancestral link to the armed forces at all, but my school did a very good job of benignly brainwashing me to think otherwise. It wasn’t a military school, as such, but public schools are timeless places, or used to be, and the walls of our chapel were slathered with the names of boys just like us, who sat on the same benches that we did, and slept in the same rooms, and had then left this place to die in trenches and on beaches somewhere else. The Cadet Corps was obligatory. I could probably still strip and re-assemble an SA80 in well under a minute. Never fired one, mind.
As a result, Remembrance Day was a very big deal. Even today, the sight of a poppy invariably stirs one of two very clear memories. The first is of a boy of about 13 singing ‘O Valiant Hearts’ in the row in front of me in chapel. I can still see him, intoning the words with such respect and conviction that I can remember feeling powerfully moved by the sense of lineage and the fierce nobility of it all, even though I wasn’t much older myself. We were all moved by Remembrance Day. There is no patriot like a teenage boy. We knew these people were heroes, and we knew they had died for us.
The second memory is of another boy, of about the same age, running down a corridor with the back of his white shirt spotted in red. That was the thing about poppies. You could fluff out the flower bit, bend the metal out to a right angle from its black plastic base, and use it to fashion a brutal ninja dart thing that could be thrown with moderate accuracy up to half an inch into an unprotected back. Most years the craze for this sort of thing would last about a week.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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