EVEN BEFORE British prime minister Gordon Brown had gone to Buckingham Palace yesterday morning to seek Queen Elizabeth’s permission to call an election on May 6th, one four-year-old, Elwen Cameron, son of Conservative Party leader David Cameron, had already delivered his verdict.
“Stop making boring speeches, Daddy,” Master Cameron had said during weekend horseplay, his father told campaign staff shortly before the prime minister headed out from Downing Street, flanked by a motorcycle escort, for the short journey down the Mall to meet the queen. It is now up to Elwen’s father David, Mr Brown, Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg and the hundreds of others who will vie for the public’s attention over the next four weeks to strive to entice a population disenchanted with politics after last year’s MPs’ expenses scandal to the polling stations. Just 61.4 per cent voted in 2005.
Conservative leader John Major had a better mandate, in terms of voter turnout, than any achieved by Mr Brown’s predecessor Tony Blair in his 1992 “back from the dead” triumph, and Mr Brown, who would only in despair turn to a Conservative for anything, will, no doubt, be hoping to emulate the grey Tory, who managed to portray himself as an underdog rather than the heir to Margaret Thatcher.
The echoes of Mr Major were around Downing Street yesterday as Mr Brown came out, flanked by his cabinet, to sound the official start: “I come from an ordinary family, in an ordinary town, and I’ve never forgotten where I come from, or the values – hard work, duty, fairness, telling the truth – my parents instilled in me,” he intoned for the cameras. The subtext, of course, is that he is not Mr Cameron, the Eton-educated son of a stockbroker father and a mother whose father was a baronet.
Brown will attempt to put forward his human face to the public “across the length and breadth” of Britain, always difficult for a shy man. Cameron will opt for a hint of British Obamaesque – change, but without too much of the high-flown Washington rhetoric. The Conservative leader had his own soundbite: “It comes down to this. You don’t have to put up with another five years of Gordon Brown.” In truth, both were happy to limit themselves to some carefully chosen photo ops for the first day, with the public kept at a distance. This is a marathon, but a journey of a thousand steps should not begin with a fall.