Politician in Human Being shocker

I'm going to be boringly predictable today because the news has gifted me the only exciting story of the last couple of days. Who would have thought that John Prescott had it in him? For four years the grumbling great porker has been shuffled to the back of the cabinet by an embarrassed looking Tony Blair ("Look Peter, we have to have one of the old guard in the cabinet to keep those awful left wing types in line..."). Apparently, this has put him in rather a bad mood and turned him into a ticking timebomb just waiting for an opportunity to go off. Yesterday whilst on the campaign trail he was given that opportunity courtesy of a bloke with a mullet hair cut, and an egg.

I hardly need add to the mounds of print that have already been written about "the incident", but for those of you who didn't see what happened, a gentleman registered his protest at Mr. Prescotts transport policy via the medium of lobbing an egg at him. Mr. Prescott received the well delivered protest with all the good grace that one would expect of a navvy from Hull and delivered a rebuttal in the form of a rather impressive left jab to the jaw. If only parliamentary debate was so interesting... ("And now it's over to Prime Ministers Question Time coming to you live from Battersea Gym. Mr. Blair has weighed in at 175lbs and Mr. Hague at 140lbs. Winner is by two falls or a knockout!")

I've also allowed myself a chuckle at the Tory reaction to this little kerfuffle. After having spent their years in opposition bleating about law and order and the erosion of the right of self defence (such as when the farmer Tony Martin shot the burglar a while back; remember how bitterly they complained about how unjust the decision to jail Mr. Martin was? No? Well, seeing as no one pays much attention to the Tories I'm not surprised...) they are now given a ball blisteringly good opportunity to make political capital and they can't! So far their reaction has been to pretty much mumble something into their collective beard about how he shouldn't have lost his cool, as all politicians should expect some heckling.

Personally, I find it rather sweet to see that the supposedly great and good of the country are actually real human beings rather than the personification of a particular cause or viewpoint. I'm not a fan of Prescott or the Labour party but I suspect his little duel yesterday will win far more votes than it will lose. If somebody whom you'd never met before threw an egg at you in the street, what would you do? Not everyone would lamp the bastard, but some would and of the ones who wouldn't I suspect many of us would silently applaud them.

There's far too few examples of Politicians behaving in a similar way to you or I, and what is even more annoying is that on the rare occasions that they do they are either vilified or ridiculed by the press. The headline of The Sun treats the Prescott Punch as a piece of slapstick humour, Paddy Ashdown became Paddy Pantsdown after his affair, and Peter Mandelson was depicted as the devil incarnate.

"What?" I hear you cry, "Peter Mandelson behaving like a human being? I have not heard such reports! To what do you refer?"
Well, although it is by now old news, I refer to the Hinduja Brothers and the row over their passports. To recap, the brothers are Indian millionaires. The accusation was that, in exchange for funding part of the Millennium Dome, Mandelson would use his influence to get them British Passports. The row of course caused Mandy to resign for a second time thus ending his cabinet career for the foreseeable future.

I found this rather touchingly human of the political prince of darkness for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Hinduja brothers were friends with Mandy, so essentially he was using his position to try and help out a couple of his mates. Now admittedly when one bears in minds that he was involved in government, that does make the implications rather more serious. But what he did is no different to myself asking a friend who is a computer programmer to come and fix my frequently broken machine at no cost other than a few beers at the pub. The implications may indeed be different but the principle is the same.
Secondly, Mandy was minister of the Dome at the time. He is also MP for Hartlepool. The fact that he was willing to bear responsibility for the dome just goes to show the lengths that he will go to in order to avoid Hartlepool and frankly speaking, fair play to him!

It seems that, although we complain about the out of touch attitude of many politicians, we have an equally large problem with them behaving like a normal person. Perhaps it's no wonder that all in Parliament are so evasive and cagey when interviewed. If they behave in that way then at least they won't be condemned out of hand. If they deviate from this then they are open to ridicule and no-one likes being made to appear stupid or as a figure or fun. Are we encouraging blandness in politics?

Not overtly, no. But could we be said to be giving tacit approval to the almost total lack of character in British politics. Every party conference or major announcement is stage managed to the nth degree so that there is no danger of debate or argument, it is simply a matter of rubber stamping the decisions already made by the upper echelons of the party. This is partly a result of the publics disapproval of the rowdy scenes that used to be a feature of party conferences; socialists kicking off at Kinnock for moving the Labour Party towards the centre rather than far left; LibDems with their total inability to vote the way that their leaders wanted them to. In fact, only the Tories have always (well, within my memory anyway) kept things on an even keel, and that's possibly because they were terrified of Maggie...

With that in mind, I think it would be far more entertaining if politicians had to be interviewed by a member of the public. Not as per Question Time which is stupifyingly dull and well controlled. No, I want to see bloke or lass from the pub giving Blair a hard time! Does you remember when Maggie got interviewed by a member of the public after the Belgrano was sank during the Falklands? It was the only time I'd ever seen her running scared, but people respected her for facing the grilling (although tellingly, she never did it again). And more important than that, it was bloody entertaining! And in an election campaign that, until Prescotts tantrum, was promising some truly epic boredom, that can only be a good thing.