Let's welcome politicians who dare to live a little

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/24/give-me-grubby-politicians

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Take two elected politicians. One is a man of privilege: a product of elite educational establishments who talks easily of values such as "commitment" and "responsibility", a man who is pictured holidaying on the beach with his family and who makes every effort to ensure his reputation is untarnished by scandal.

The other is a 330lb bruiser who has admitted to smoking crack cocaine, "a lot of marijuana" and to an alcohol problem. He is alleged to have links with gangs and has been filmed threatening to kill an unspecified person on videotape. Earlier this month, when it looked like it couldn't get any worse, notorious hellraiser Charlie Sheen wrote him an open letter of support.

Which of these two men would you expect to have the higher approval rating? You might understandably plump for the first – David Cameron. Because whatever you think of his views, here is a career politician of the first order, a man so aware of the need to cultivate his public image that he used to cycle to work to promote his green agenda until it emerged that an official car trailed behind him to carry his papers.

But it is the second man, Toronto's embattled mayor, Rob Ford, who has the edge. Despite his considerable indiscretions, a recent Ipsos poll put his approval rating at 40% – 2% ahead of Cameron, according to analysis by the University of Nottingham.

And Ford is not the only political maverick capturing public attention. In New York, they have just elected Bill de Blasio as mayor, a former Sandinista supporter whose wife once identified herself as a hardline lesbian. In London, Boris Johnson's peccadilloes are well known. Yet when it emerged that he had fathered a child outside wedlock, 76% of voters said it would make no difference to their likelihood of voting for him.

Last week, the Tory MP Nick Boles gave a speech in which he lauded Johnson's popularity in a climate where "there is a substantial group of people who will literally not even contemplate voting Conservative".

In a multimedia age, when politicians are obsessed by how things will play in the 24-hour news cycle, when an MP is more likely to be shaped by focus groups than by hard-won conviction and when public relations have become more important than relations with the public, voters are beginning to tire of the political cleanskin. A man or woman with no real life experience behind them appears out of touch and untrustworthy. By contrast, someone with a chequered past is viewed as authentic and refreshing.

When it emerged recently that the Labour MP Gloria De Piero had posed for topless pictures as a teenager, her dignified response won much support. "I don't think anyone wants politics to be open only to those people who were planning their political careers in their teens," she wrote.

We live in an era of hyper-branding, where adolescents package themselves as pop stars on prime-time TV and job applicants are turned down for not having enough Twitter followers. An era where the arrival of the John Lewis Christmas advert is hailed as a cultural high point, a passion play for our consumerist times. But increasingly the dream feels hollow. Successful marketing relies on the notion that a failsafe process can be applied to anything to make it sell better – from personal reputations to cashmere onesies. It is anti-individual.

Perhaps, though, the tide is turning. There is a new thirst for characters, for mischief-makers and rascals, for politicians whose mistakes make them more accessible to the rest of us. There is a growing mistrust of the political elite from both parties – the overwhelmingly white, male, middle-class cohorts who all seem to have attended the same Tony Blair School of Convincing Hand Gestures and whose only experience of real life is nodding at the security guards on the way into the Commons. I don't want my politicians to smoke crack. But I do want them to be more than just a John Lewis advert.

Kim and Kanye are keen on Kensington, OK?

I do so admire consistency in a celebrity. Kim Kardashian, for instance, clearly has a thing for the letter "K". Her mother, Kris, named Kim's sisters Khloe, Kourtney, Kylie and Kendall. Kim dutifully carried on the family tradition by marrying a basketball player who was also called Kris.

When that ended in divorce, she set her sights on the only other global male celebrity whose first name started with the same letter – Kanye West (well, it was either him or Keith Lemon). Now it emerges that Kim and Kanye are intent on moving to London, viewing it as "the next phase of their empire growth". Which makes it sound rather sinister, but no matter.

Unsurprisingly, the couple have set their sights on Kensington, presumably feeling that Kew or Kingston were a bit too suburban for their needs.

When the couple eventually move here, I trust they will get their Hummer serviced at Kwik Fit, sport K-Swiss trainers on their feet and eat only Special K for breakfast, followed by KFC for lunch with a Kit Kat for pudding.

After a lifetime of Los Angeles sunshine, let's just hope that the oft-maligned British klimate doesn't put them off.

Who shot JR? That would be telling

It's increasingly hard to be offensive these days. Outrageous punditry has become an extreme sport, played out by a new generation of the professionally perverse. Prime among these is Katie Hopkins, a former <em>Apprentice</em> contestant who now writes a column for the <em>Sun</em> and pontificates on daytime TV, appearing on the <em>This Morning</em> sofa as regularly as an untreated cold sore.

Targets of her substantial ire have so far included ginger children ("so much harder to love"), ADHD ("an invented illness") and a man trying to commit suicide by jumping from a motorway bridge ("must people kill themselves so inconveniently?")

It makes it more difficult for the rest of us to shock when someone like Hopkins exists. I tried my best to get into a Twitter spat last week, but to no avail. Someone accused me of having included a "spoiler" in my interview with Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, who plays Katrine in the Danish TV drama, <em>Borgen</em>. The final series of <em>Borgen</em> kicked off last Saturday and apparently I had unwittingly ruined this person's enjoyment by "revealing" that Katrine was a single mother. Leaving aside the fact that this information was obvious within the first 30 seconds of the opening scene, I felt it necessary to point out to my disappointed reader that the programme had actually aired the night before my article appeared.

Perhaps they had recorded the episode to watch at a later date. Still, I'm not sure that our burgeoning love for on-demand television means journalists should be forced to write under perpetual embargo, for fear of accidentally disclosing some vital plot development that Susie and Neil from down the road haven't caught up with.

How should we break it to them that JR has been shot? Do they know that Will Young has won <em>Pop Idol</em> yet? That Dirty Den and Angie have split up? I hope so. Otherwise I've just given the game away. Again. Complaints to the usual address.

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