The cocktail in which showbusiness and politics are stirred together was first served many years before a British Prime Minister had drinks with Noel Gallagher or a Hollywood actor ran for the presidency.
When MPs enter the House of Commons they touch the foot of a bronze Winston Churchill for good luck. He is remembered as the greatest of parliamentary leaders, but he had a personality which burned brighter on the world stage than an early Mick Jagger.
Churchill could make extraordinary speeches, yet the flash of a V-sign for the cameras and his broad-bellied appetite for life inspired a nation to defy the precision-geared Nazi war machine.
Churchill’s rollicking, untidy, booze-fuelled, soundbite-shooting, America-enchanting public persona has more in common with British bands that routinely “invade” American shores than with the focus-group formed, managerial politicians at the forefront of UK politics today.
Politicians with the energy and impetuosity of Keith Richards or Johnny Rotten would struggle to survive in a modern party machine, but at least the public might know their names. Should we be concerned a third of students failed to identify Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party and a similar proportion did not know David Cameron helms the party of Churchill? Nick Clegg must be mildly irate that more than half did not know he headed the Liberal Democrats.
These three men are working hard for relatively little cash to sell their party to the electorate, but can they personally embody a vision for change with the gusto of a Desmond Tutu or even a Richard Branson? The electorate eventually kicked Churchill out of office but they forgave him for his less unenlightened policies because they remembered how the unquenchable fire of his spirit illuminated and warmed a country which could have frozen in terror.
Similarly, the international love affair with President Kennedy continues, long after his philandering and politicking have been exposed. Yes, he was a flawed man, but he possessed a magician’s ability to project a vision for a world beyond the Cold War. Eleven handwritten love letters and three telegrams to a Swedish woman are going under the hammer and are expected to sell for $100,000.
Meanwhile, controversy is aflame in the US over a planned mini-series from 24-creator Joel Surnow about the Kennedy clan, with a web campaign claiming it will be a “right-wing character assassination”. In four decades’ time, will similar fascination and battles swirl around the legacies or today’s leaders? The likes of JFK can still arouse passions because they were passionate about their calling.
It is no bad thing if party conferences have the atmosphere of rock concerts and there are balloons beside policy papers. Every generation has a shot at changing the world, and those who have a go will be remembered.
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1 comments:
Bravo!
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