More than just a feeling

Inspector Gadget gets into shape for the fight against corruption

I never thought I would find myself quoting with approval anything that Tony Blair had said, but here it is: he urged voters in Britain to remember that today they will be electing a government and not expressing a feeling.

At every general election, and lots of times in between, I find myself reminding my readers of the exact same thing. Sometimes, it’s not so much reminding people as explaining it to them. The concept at times appears to be novel that a vote, whichever way you use it and even if you don’t use it at all, invariably translates into a government.

Using your vote to express a feeling is a sign of political, civic and emotional immaturity.

David Cameron

I’ve been wondering what it is about David Cameron that makes me uneasy and leaves me unconvinced. Is it his policies and his position on Europe? No, not quite. It’s something more visceral than that. It’s one of those feelings that Tony Blair doesn’t like and I don’t either.

I finally worked out what it is when reading in yesterday’s newspaper the words of one British (male) elector who said: “I don’t like him. His skin is like a baby’s.”

Bingo. That’s why he unnerves me too. He’s a 43-year-old man with the sort of complexion more usually found under a clean nappy.

The skincare companies currently engaged in opening new markets among men can sell it in any way they please, but the fact remains that people have primeval negative reactions to grown men whose faces are not in some way careworn or ravaged by time.

This is the great advantage that Gordon Brown has over both Cameron and Clegg, though it remains largely unspoken because it is one of those embarrassingly irrational ‘feelings’.

It is also going to be Lawrence Gonzi’s advantage over Joseph Muscat, though our own Labour Party clearly believes that the reverse is true. The Malta Labour Party hasn’t worked this out yet, but Muscat’s lack of visual ruggedness works against him. Women find it singularly unappealing.

I don’t think David Cameron is one of those men a friend of mine likes to describe disparagingly and with a slight shudder as “a face-cream user”. He just has that typically ‘English rose’ complexion which, coupled with a life of privilege, no financial concerns and little or no exposure to the sun, results in skin like a baby’s bottom well into late middle-age.

That skin – which properly belongs on a man two decades his junior – makes Cameron look like a pampered patsy, and any man who looks like a pampered patsy is hard to take seriously. More than his social status, his Eton schooling and his accent – which is resolutely middle-class and not anything more than that, despite descriptions to the contrary – that skin has worked against him.

Whatever the new trends dictate, we expect men in their 40s to look at least a little rugged. It makes them more attractive to women and more trustworthy to other men. Men are innately suspicious of smooth, glossy skin on other men. And women just don’t think it’s sexy.

The infants at Maltastar might not know this yet, but women – girls are not the same thing – actually prefer grown men’s faces to be marked, lined and yes, even pitted, rather than baby-soft and pink.

We’ll know later on today what the voters think, when the results of the first exit polls are out. Stay glued to BBC News.

Inspector Gadget

Anglu Farrugia gave an interview to Malta Today in which he was at great pains to remind us that he is “the Number Two in the Labour Party”. The inevitable infantile joke came unbidden to mind: ‘Anglu Farrugia confirms that he is just a piece of crap.’

But then I moved on to the more serious stuff.

Farrugia made an attempt at defending Muscat’s line on a private member’s bill and a free vote on divorce, which came easily to him given that his thinking on matters of democracy and the role of the prime minister appear to be just as confused as his boss’s, the Number One in the Labour Party.

Because more than 90 per cent of the population espouses the Roman Catholic faith, Farrugia said, then “one has to legislate according to the common interest”.

Yes, that’s right: the Number Two in the Labour Party believes that there should be majority rule over minority interests.

He then went on to demonstrate that he doesn’t know the difference between Joseph Muscat the MP with his private member’s bill and Joseph Muscat the prime minister who can legislate if he wants to do so and is not being held to ransom by a couple of political heisters, like the present incumbent.

Those who have a moral dilemma with divorce can use their free vote to depart from the official line, the Number Two in the Labour party told his interviewer.

And the interviewer, clearly unfamiliar with the concept of a private member’s bill, failed to point out that with just such a bill there is, by definition, no official line.

A bill is either a private member’s bill – put forward by any MP in his or her own name and not the party’s – or it is put forward by the government and is by definition the official line.

There is not going to be an official Labour Party position on divorce because, as we have been told on more than one occasion, divorce is not going to be proposed in Labour’s 2013 electoral programme. It is indeed a sorry state of affairs when the Number Two in the Labour Party does not understand this.

But then, I don’t expect any better from Inspector Gadget.

This article is published in The Malta Independent today.