Nick Clegg isn’t the first politician to be tripped by a child – he won’t be the last
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Version 0 of 1. Most politicians would claim to be fighting for our future, but sometimes the future fights back, as Nick Clegg recently found during his weekly LBC Radio phone-in, when he was skewered by a caller claiming to be a nine-year-old over school meals. He is not the first and will not be the last politician to fall foul of an unpredictable encounter with a minor or a photo opportunity gone wrong. The internet is littered with photographs of weeping babies – who really do not want to be paraded, held or kissed by a stranger with a rosette – and ministers making serious speeches to audiences of children too young to have mastered the art of looking riveted by someone very dull indeed. And yet our beloved elected representatives of all political factions, at all levels of government, all around the world, continue to pursue that elusive publicity gold: the moment when maybe, just maybe, they look warm, parental, ordinary; the moment when they look more like people we know and like, rather than awkward alien invaders who have mastered the basic human form, but not yet basic human behaviour. George Osborne, the person responsible for the UK’s finances, was left mumbling incoherently when he was asked by a seven-year-old the answer to seven times eight. “I’m not going to get into a whole string of umm … I’m not going to … I’ve, I’ve, I’ve made it a rule in life not to answer a load of maths questions, so …” To be fair, seven times eight is a tricky one. George Bush’s inimitable vice-president, Dan Quayle, during a school visit, famously corrected a pupil’s spelling of the word “potato” by advising him to “add one little bit at the end”. “You’re right phonetically”, he said before exclaiming “There ya go!” when the student changed it to “potatoe”. Presumably, as in Vice-President Potatoe-Head. The list goes on. Chris Christie, widely touted as a possible Republican presidential candidate in the next US election, pledged his allegiance to the Dallas Cowboys, despite being governor of New Jersey and speaking at a New Jersey primary school, and was enthusiastically booed by the kids. New Zealand prime minister John Key was asked by a pupil: “Do politicians have to be good liars?” It is a genius question with no right answer. And it is not just other people’s children who can create awkward situations for politicians. It must have been no fun for Margaret Thatcher to admit her son had got lost in the desert during the Paris-Dakar Rally, or for Tony Blair to explain why his son had been arrested for being “drunk and incapable”. It certainly cannot have been easy for David Cameron to face the media after forgetting his eight-year-old daughter Nancy at the Plough Inn. Perhaps it is no wonder then that mixing one’s own children with an already perilous situation and trying to turn them into a photo opportunity resulted in possibly the most cringe-worthy of such instances in UK political history: the then minister for agriculture, John Gummer, feeding his four-year-old daughter a burger, at the height of the BSE crisis. Some have suggested that the caller who put Nick Clegg on the spot was not a child; that he was “stitched up” by an impostor. LBC has insisted that it spoke to the boy and his mother before the show, and to the boy’s headteacher afterwards and that the call was genuine. Why does it matter? The questions were certainly legitimate. What was the stitch-up? There is something to the idea that politicians find it more difficult to be aggressive or dissemble to a child; the idea that bogus complexity is used to obscure the truth. Perhaps then, when it comes to any government policy, our reaction to stock responses, vague political catchphrases, obfuscatory statistics and oleaginous evasions should be “explain it to me as if I were a nine-year-old”. |