Greasy Poll

‘MOST politicians probably feel like paedophiles most of the time.

‘People say I must be batty to want this job’

Not only do they spend an inordinate amount of time hanging round schools and kissing babies, but they are about as popular as a child sex offender on a Portsmouth housing estate.

However, most politicians know better than to compare themselves publicly to these most demonised of beings. That’s why they’re politicians.

Not our old friend Iain Duncan Smith, who yesterday reinforced his ‘gaffe-a-minute’ reputation in the eyes of the Independent by doing just that.

‘I wasn’t quite certain whether I was supposed to have had some paedophile relationship or something by the end of it,’ he says of his recent trials, ‘because the intensity and the ferocity made me wonder whether this was real.’

IDS also described it as being like ‘one of those near-death experiences when somebody sits above themselves and watches in a rather detached way thinking, ‘I am not quite sure what’s going on here and whether I’m part of this”.

If that sounds very much like a description of IDS’s leadership, then it could equally apply to his successor Michael Howard – a man permanently stuck in a limbo between the worlds of the dead and the living.

It hasn’t taken long for the new leader to drag his party further into the mire, with a poll for today’s Indy showing that the Tories have slipped three points in the polls since he emerged as the probable next leader.

Howard, who we should remember was – as well as the most disastrous Home Secretary in modern political history – one of the principal architects of the poll tax, is also perceived as less trustworthy than his predecessor.

But Howard yesterday embarked on a publicity drive to try to persuade voters that he had changed – and not just from his customary bat shape into something resembling a human being.

‘One of the tings I have learnt is that it is a very good thing to listen to people a lot,’ he says.

Ignore them? Yes. But listen to them before you ignore them.’

Posted: 4th, November 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink