I want to be like common people

 

Sometimes you feel sorry for politicians but most of the time it's easy to have nothing but contempt for them when they try too hard to be 'one of us'. Whether it's Gordon Brown 'liking' The Arctic Monkeys, Tony Blair sitting down on a standing only area of St.James Park or David Cameron stating his love for The Jam and The Smiths there's something desperate about politicians trying to 'connect' with the electorate through shared collective social activity. I much preferred John Major and his love of opera and cricket because they weren't exercises in being liked, that was him, of course he never mentioned his fondness for Currie at the time but hey, you can't have everything.

I am quite sure that when George Osborne decided to tweet a photograph of himself eating a  burger whilst planning the latest round of government departmental spending cuts he was simply trying to say, 'Look, I'm busy but I'm still eating and it's a takeaway' but the question is why should he feel the need to do that?  The conceit of the 'we are all in this together' is obvious across both front benches in the House of Commons with something like 33 millionaires between the Coalition and Labour, we are plainly not all in this together, when you add in the pay rises, gold plated pensions and executive directorships that are a result of who you know rather than what you know.

I don't really care if the Osborne burger did cost £9.70 as The Sun states, I wouldn't expect the Chancellor to be eating value burgers, but coming on top of the fact that he couldn't actually spell the word Britain correctly and he seems to have photo shopped a pen out of his right hand I wonder exactly what the point of yet another failed P.R stunt was.

One of the points of the last week which has slipped by almost unheralded is the apparent re branding of Labour. It's being done quietly and yet quite obviously and it's not just the usual suspects who are letting them 'get away with it', the coverage across what I would have classed as 'right of centre' newspapers, not magazines though, and surprisingly Sky has been a little less challenging than perhaps it should be.