Politics is clearly in trouble and strife

Politics has come to a pretty point when the leader having a nice wife is touted as a ‘secret weapon’ in the election battle. John Major may have tried to wheel out Norma but at least no one took it seriously – least of all Norma.

Under Mussolini the cult of personality at least had sparks of imagination – good hats, for instance – but now it’s very drab. The choice in the forthcoming UK General Election between voting Labour, Tory or Lib Dem seems to come down to whether we’d most like to have a pint with Gord, Dave or Cleggover. Which candidate looks more like he’s been in the hot wash with a drawerful of Daz in the whiter-than-white stakes? Whose got the best spouse?

So there’s the prime minister’s wife, Sarah B; the leader of the opposition’s wife, Sam C; and Miriam González Durántez who is married to Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Don’t know how to decide between the three? As Cilla Black would say on any other ‘Blind Date’, here’s our Graham with a quick recap…

‘Well, will you pick number one? She’s best mates with Naomi Campbell but so far she’s never hit a member of her domestic staff – unlike her husband! Or will you pick saucy number two? She’s toff totty, looks good in skirts and is coming soon to a doorstep near you, pregnant! Or will you pick mystery number three? She kept her own surname and the only thing anyone can remember about her husband is that he told Piers Morgan he’d shagged “up to 30” women. The choice… is yours!’

This week it’s certainly been sexy Number 2, David Cameron’s wife Samantha, who has been getting most of the close-up shots in the Election Date roadshow. David Cameron’s poll lead was almost wiped out even though Gordon Brown was getting perhaps the worst personal press of his career. Something had to be done. While the PM emoted for Piers Morgan, Cameron declared that he would eschew slitting his wrists for a Britain’s Got Talent host and a nonplussed nation in favour of something ‘a bit more substantial’ – promptly booking himself into the Alan Titchmarsh show to play second fiddle to a florist who showed the audience how to make flower arrangements in a teacup. Former Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri played a cover of ‘Xanadu’ by Olivia Newton-John, and Dave revealed that we would all be seeing a lot more of his wife. And from then on there has been no avoiding her.

In quick succession, Samantha has appeared on Trevor McDonald’s show on ITV, talking about how Dave likes to make a mess in the kitchen, has promised to devote five weeks to pepping up Dave’s campaign, and has been splashed all over the newspapers in slit-to-thigh dresses from a modelling shoot she did years ago when was only newly Mrs Dave… Very odd, incidentally, that these shots were suddenly ‘found’ so close to an election: ‘In a more playful pose, Mrs Cameron models a beige sheepskin shearling minidress as she frolics on the floor with a kitten.’ I’ll bet she does. But now, midweek, she’s switched from vamp to Earth Mother and has revealed she is expecting a baby in September. According to the London Evening Standard, ‘a baby has not acquired such national importance since Diana, Princess of Wales did her duty. The election baby could be the break her husband needs to regain his lead in the polls.’ Vote me, vote my fetus.

She comes from aristocratic stock. Her mother is Lady Astor. Her father is Sir Reginald Sheffield, a direct descendant of Charles II. But Sam Cam does her level best tn come across as a woman of the people. It was my great mistake, when young, to think that I’d sound better if I started imitating the pronunciation of BBC newsreaders, meaning I am now stuck with the sort of hoity-toity accent which leads my dad to squeal ‘Euw hellluuuuuur’ down the phone at me whenever I call home like he’s channeling the ghost of Celia Johnson with a corncob rammed up her backside. But Sam Cam has done the opposite of social climbing through the vowel system and adopted the Lily Allen approach to modern-day posh-girl elocution. ‘It is enormously interesting and significant’, railed Peter Hitchens this week (leaving questions as to what else in life he finds ‘enormously interesting’ – watching mould grow perhaps?) ‘that the Tory leader’s wife, daughter of a land-owning baronet, brought up on broad acres, educated at a genteel private girls’ academy and then at one of the great Public Schools, and now running a business that caters to London’s dwindling but unflinching cut-glass classes, should speak Estuary English’.

Of course it doesn’t really matter what kind of accent Samantha Cameron has – but in the era of personality politics, or the era of the personality-of-the-wife politics, it somehow seems to. We’re never going to know Samantha – so weird things like her improbable accent are what we are presented with. She seems to have been drafted in to make Dave somehow seem ‘authentic’, whereas, in fact, her sudden appearance does quite the opposite. Together they look rather like mannequins from an upmarket retailer arranged in a window, everything from their outfit to their statements carefully choreographed by a team of spindoctors who appear to think the public are thick enough to buy what’s on offer.

If there’s a vision of Sam Cam I might like to vote for it’d be Sam Cam the no-nonsense career woman who leaves the politics to her politician husband. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, at Smythson staff called her ‘Anna Wintour… because staffers were warned never to try to greet or talk to her. I think this “ordinary” lark is a big joke.’ But, of course, even if she was like that I still couldn’t vote for her because she’s not standing for election. Sam Cam should be totally irrelevant to political discourse today. The less we see of her the better.

It must be pretty dismal being a leader’s wife. The newspapers only care about your hair, clothes and shoes. Your husband’s only interested in his poll ratings. As a pained Sarah Brown confessed recently: ‘I’ve been grinning all day and my face is hurting.’

Tony Livesey: BBC Radio 5 Live

At 11.15pm on the 10th of March I joined the debate on politicians who sleep with ladies who are not their wives on BBC Radio 5 Live's Tony Livesey show.

BBC Breakfast

At 10 to 10 on Saturday 6th March I appeared on BBC Breakfast talking about Essex Girls.

Republic talk on the Royal PR machine

Last month there was, at last, a royal story that warmed the cockles of my heart.

It was the announcement that the whole of the BBC won't shut down if Prince Andrew dies. Not only has this man disinterested me profoundly whilst he was – and is - alive but now he won't interrupt my viewing pleasure when he cops it. And to be fair, it's not just me and it's not just him, surely around 90% of the British population really couldn't give a jig about the other royals so recently demoted on the Beeb's death list: Prince Harry, Prince Edward, his wife Sophie, or Princess Anne either.

On principal, I don't think that any royal death at all should trouble the viewing schedules of those who like to spend their days glued to Jeremy Kyle – and certainly not the Duke of Edinburgh's, who is still on the Category 1 list and whose only service to the nation, as far as I can tell, has been to make inappropriate jokes about Indian electricians.

The age of deference is supposed to be over, Diana is supposed to have made a mockery of the whole clan, but yet the royals continue to have a far greater impact on the print and broadcast media surely than they merit. The Queen is the head of state, and so you could argue the tribute would be apt – but why is Prince William's death more important than the Prime Minister's, exactly? In fact, why is Prince Charles dying more important than the death of Bob Dylan? There is Bob – who gave us Blood on the Tracks. And there is Prince Charlie – who had a valet iron his newspaper.

When both the Queen Mother died and when Diana died I was out of the country. But I hear that even the shopping channel QVC shut down for several hours denying housewives everywhere with the chance to buy miracle irons and garden gadgets. My own paper, The Evening Standard, is entirely complicit in this over deference to the royals, which appears to happen on an almost daily basis, and especially when Prince Charles opens his mouth to say something about architecture. The newspaper's new campaign against poverty in the capital is adorned with a big fat balding picture of Prince William – as if phenomenally rich Willie is an authority on the subject. As if the RAF pilot who lands a Chinook helicopter on his girlfriend's lawn is going to sort the situation much like Kings and Queens in the Middle Ages were thought to cure scrofula by touch.

I work at the Londoner's Diary, which is a gossip column and primarily dabbles with cultural figures and socialites – so I won't be able to give even a percent as much information on the relationship between the royals and the media as Richard Palmer, here, of the Express. I am really coming at the topic as a reader. The royal stories we run on the diary generally consist of a member of the avant-garde industrial band Throbbing Gristle complaining via Twitter that the Queen and her security guards are clogging up his train back to London. Or that someone got stuck in the lavatory when they were handing out the honours at Buckingham Palace. Generally the Palace declines to comment.

But what I do want to talk about is the simultaneous claim that the Royals ought to retain their incredibly privileged position in society – their posthumous ability to shut down the telly schedule and so on - WHILST we RESTRAIN our unhealthy desire to read about their private lives - as we are constantly told we ought to do. Post Diana there's been a concerted palace campaign against paparazzi photographs taken of the royals. Especially its junior branches: at the weekend Kate Middleton looked set to win £10,000 because a German press agency took pictures of her playing tennis.

In royal eyes the press and its photographers are eagerly received when it suits their own ends. The editor of my page recently received an invitation from Clarence House to a summit on wool, courtesy of Prince Charles. And the Prince of Wales was quite happy to try to win public support with a call for the NHS to embrace complementary therapies. But our reporters would not be treated so warmly if they reported on Prince Harry mainlining one of the £800 cocktail treasure casket at Boujis or Kitt's or wherever else Harry hoorays it up these days. Prince Charles is pretty keen on the press when he wants to get the message out about organic farming. But when it comes to Kate Middleton – or whoever the next Princess of Wales is likely to be – the palace appears to shudder at any coverage at all.

But the press has been vital to the monarchy's survival. There is no denying that Princess Diana almost single-handedly pepped it up – and that she used the press to do it.

Now it seems that the royals are hoping to revert to being stuffy old anachronisms who shoot and hunt and ski and wear tweed like the Windsors always did, in complete privacy, whilst occasionally 'doing' a Diana to promote themselves when it suits them. But just like a footballer, who earns millions of pounds and year and has his family pose for photos in OK! Magazine it is not particularly fair for the royals to whinge about press intrusion when the press publishes something they don't happen to like. Or to try to prevent it being printed in the first place – just as the royals are so keen to curb paparazzi shots.

They want to curb the interest in Kate Middleton, but surely the question of who a royal is going to marry is absolutely integral to the monarchy as an institution? It's a hereditary position, after all.

One of the conspiracy theories rarely cited about Diana is my personally honed one – that someone in the palace, possibly the Duke of Edinburgh it has long been muted has rather an eye for the ladies - grasped the fact that an injection of good looking genes was necessary in order for the monarchy to survive. Would Australia be half so keen on Prince William if he looked like a cross between Charles and Camilla?

As it is, the Diana genes haven't been quite enough to prevent him going bald.

It seems bizarre to claim that the monarchy ought to retain its position AND completely control its picture coverage. The Foreign Secretary doesn't complain that he's been photographed ridiculously brandishing a banana. Pauline Prescott doesn't complain about being door stepped when her husband had an affair. She stayed in the house and soldiered on with the home improvements. She was married to a man who had a public position. It's all part of the job.

Kate Middleton, if she marries William, is about to enter a life of luxury to which most can only dream. As one example of the privilege she can expect, I would like to draw your attention to this story about Airmiles Andy, aka the Duke of York, who is praised by the Richard Kay column for forking out nearly £90,000 of his own money to fly himself to Central America as a special representative for UK trade and investment.

First of all, as a man who appears to have done remarkably little with his life, how is Prince Andrew a proper representative for UK trade?

And second of all, how many people could afford to pay £90,000 out of their own pocket for flights if they didn't have a ludicrous amount of money to start with? It makes all the furore over MP's expenses look completely ridiculous by comparison.

There is no question that the royals use the press when it suits them. When an image of Prince Harry was printed in which he wore a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party the press was used to repair the damage. Harry was dispatched to Lesotho for what the PR industry would have called "reputation management". Prince Charles' communications' secretary Paddy Harveson dispatched him to Africa to be photographed with Aids victims, reading out a carefully rehearsed script. This is, of course, the tried and tested way that celebrities generate themselves good publicity. Angelina Jolie, Bono, Sting, Bob Geldof are arguably now even more famous for their concern for Africa than they are for their films or pop songs. Even Richard Kay (who is rumoured to have been extremely close to Harry's mother, Princess Diana) pulled a face, labelling the performance "a glorified publicity stunt."

Basically it seems the royals want to do a Di, whilst preventing a Di when it comes to images being flashed around of them on yachts with the offspring of millionaires. The main argument against the paparazzi settles upon the notion that the paps killed the Princess of Hearts. But this is completely untrue.

Diana was killed by a drunk driver, who drove extremely fast, who crashed while she was not wearing a seatbelt. According to former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan's book The Insider, the Princess would often tip off journalists as to where she was going to be and personally fed him stories on occasion. Considering that Di had actively courted the press for many years there was no particular reason to go that fast, in that manner that one night. The journalists were carrying cameras, not guns.

In the coming years I think that the royals' relationship with the media is only going to become more fraught. Prince Charles is deeply unpopular with many. Prince William has recently returned from Australia where 58% of Aussies want him to be the next king – compared with only 30% who want Charles. Unless Kate Middleton – or a future girlfriend of William's in a Di mould - can bring back the Di factor I really think the monarchy itself will soon die a death – and afterwards it won't halt the television schedule.