‘Laugh and the world laughs with you – weep, and you stand alone.” An easy enough maxim to follow in normal life, but much harder to adhere to when you’re in politics.
For with so much death and destruction around us, it behoves our statesmen to be grave, sober-suited and devoid of levity. At least, that’s what they believe to be the case.
If so, then Labour Party leader Ed Milliband has been fighting an uphill battle of late, as a series of unfortunate photo opps and satirical barbs have undermined his attempt to appear like a statesman-in-waiting. Indeed, of late he’s been likened not so much to Winston Churchill so much as Mr Bean.
The Milliband family are no strangers to mischief making by a scurrilous media. Ed’s elder brother, David, once himself a government minister, had his own reputation fatally compromised some years back after being captured on camera holding a banana up in an idiotic pose. He at least was able to weather the cascade of ridicule; but his younger brother is finding life rather more vexatious.
First came the incident with the sandwich. While attempting to press his everyman credentials at a photo opportunity in a cafe, poor Mr Milliband was captured by press photographers with his jaws clenched tight round a breakfast bap; grease trickling down between his fingers, lips stretched wide like an alligator trying to devour a wildebeest sideways – and just to add insult to injury, he was blinking just as the shutter snapped, thus lending the whole grotesque image the appearance of someone who was barely conscious.
The incident perhaps showed up Mr Milliband’s inexperience: for if there’s one thing any seasoned politician will studiously avoid at all costs, it’s either having to don ludicrous headgear, or eat with their hands. His rival, prime minister David Cameron, learnt that lesson long ago, and nowadays confines his pubic appearances to standing in hard hats on building sites pointing at things or nodding gravely at hi-tech factory production lines.
But worse was to follow. Last week Mr Milliband found his admittedly bulbous features being compared with a famous fictional creation hugely popular here in the UK. Wallace and Gromit are a much-loved pair of animated heroes, one of which – Wallace – possesses a face apparently moulded out of Plasticine and with a perpetually hapless grin etched across his features. It didn’t take long for images of Wallace and Ed to appear side by side, whereupon even his most dedicated supporters were forced to concede that there was indeed a likeness.
All good fun of course – but such incidents as these contrive to portray the Labour leader as a bit of a fool. And while it’s easy to overestimate the deleterious effects of satire, recent political history is littered with the corpses of politicians whose careers were fatally injured by both the pen and the camera.
Many years ago David Steel, the then-leader of the Liberal Party, found his reputation severely dented after a satirical TV puppet series portrayed him as a miniature munchkin. While prime minister John Major was never able to shake off his image of a grey and colourless apparatchik after cartoonist Steve Bell depicted him as an ashen grey nonentity who wore his underpants over his trousers.
Yet to Mr Milliband’s immense credit, he has taken this recent lampooning on the chin and in doing so quite possibly turned it to his advantage. During what observers later agreed was a bold but risky public speech in central London, Mr Milliband admitted that he was not from “central casting” and that he’d never win a photo-opportunity competition with the chisel-jawed Mr Cameron. But, he argued, politics was in danger of becoming little more than a photo-op culture, a game of showbiz played by C-list celebrities, that demeans the political debate.
“Our biggest obstacle,” he concluded, “is not the Conservatives, but cynicism.”
Both his speech and his readiness to send himself up must have struck a chord, for the applause at the end was enthusiastic and heartfelt. Mr. Milliband may not win any beauty pageants, but he’s learning fast that humour and self-deprecation are two qualities the British public reveres more than any other. And who knows? It may still be he who has the last laugh come the next general election.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins