Like tears in Lorraine
Political hacks demand only a certain kind of 'hinterland' from politicians.
The possibility that Boris Johnson might not be au fait with Lorraine Kelly (or the “Lorraine Kelly” character she plays on television for tax purposes) has been seized upon by some hacks as an incredible gotcha. Putting aside the fact that Johnson in burbling mode — the verbal chaff he deploys in an attempt to avoid scrutiny — is usually detached from reality, no ‘real’ voters — the ones Westminster journalists go and visit during election campaigns — believe Boris Johnson is a “man of the people”1.
The moment in Susanna Reid’s artful skewering of Johnson that really mattered was when he falsely claimed credit for the Freedom Pass — which was introduced in 1973 — when told that 77-year-old Elsie was skipping meals and spending all day on the bus to save money. That was when his disconnection was most clear; he showed no empathy for Elsie and could not resist lying for some meagre credit (effectively saying: “Well, thanks to me she’s able to ride all day on buses to escape her freezing home.”)
Inevitably, the “who is Lorraine?” moment has led to the discourse being dragged back to being about Jeremy Corbyn. Mikey Smith, The Daily Mirror’s Westminster Correspondent tweeted:
… Jeremy Corbyn not being able to identify Ant and Dec was genuinely a three
day story.In fairness, I wrote a couple of the stories.
And I stand by them.
Not being able to identify Ant and Dec, and not knowing who Lorraine is are both deeply weird and telling flaws for men who want to run the country.
Challenged about why he was “proud about contributing to such an epic trivialisation of British politics”, he continued:
I think lacking awareness of even the broadest elements of popular culture is an indication of how interested you actually are in the lives of ordinary people. It’s a tell.
Millions of the voters JC wanted to win over spend more time thinking about Ant and Dec every week than they spend watching the news. See also, football, Loose Women, Pointless, the Kardashians, Soaps…
In one of those stories Smith stands by (Why Jeremy Corbyn not knowing who Ant and Dec are is a problem if he wants to win elections, 17 August 2016), he wrote:
For all his faults, David Cameron was acutely aware that he was not an ordinary person. He came from wealth and went to Eton and Oxford.
If he was going to convince the public that he shared their values and cared about their daily lives, he had to at least appear to share some of their interests.
So he appeared in videos with One Direction and always appeared to know who was getting evicted in Strictly, X-Factor and Bake Off.
And he always had a cheat sheet handy with the price of a pint of milk and a loaf of bread on it.
That’s a celebration of bullshit. And it’s more patronising than not knowing who Ant and Dec are or being unsure about the “legend” status of Lorraine Kelly. It assumes that ‘normal’ people — as opposed to political hacks — require the sop of politicians pretending to like the same TV shows and bands as them.
Having received some push back for his initial thread, Smith continued:
Lots of people who spend their whole lives thinking and tweeting about politics angrily unable to grasp [the] concept that not everyone is like them, and politicians might need to think about something other than politics to be successful.
Time was a politician needed a hinterland.
That time was… only recently. Harold Wilson’s ‘hinterland’ stretched to pretending to smoke a pipe in public rather than cigars he favoured in private, the less said about Ted Heath’s ‘hinterland’ the better, and Margaret Thatcher’s ‘hinterland’ amounted to insisting on cooking at home, hanging out with Jimmy Savile, and declaring herself a fan of terrible pop songs.
The source of the “hinterland” term was Dennis Healey’s wife Edna. But when he wrote in the preface to his 1989 autobiography The Time of My Life that he had "always been as interested in music, painting and poetry as in politics,” he was contrasting himself to the majority of other politicians of his era who had no such hinterland.
The “be one of the lads” demand from the media arguably kicked in heavily during the ‘Tony Blair lounging around with his guitar/having a kickabout’ era. It is, in large part, an import from the US where the “would you have a beer with them?” test became a seemingly important question about presidential candidates.
What counts as an acceptable “hinterland” and level of pop culture awareness is very context dependent. Ed Miliband’s love of baseball was deemed unsuitable while Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Arsenal was not the right kind of football fandom while making jam and gardening were framed as weird hobbies. Did he not realise that instantly identifying Ant and Dec was far more important?
During the last election campaign we were led to believe that Boris Johnson’s school boy Latin and claim to wind down at night by “solving a few quadratic equations” was terribly amusing. He’s only “out of touch” now because his usefulness has waned.
The obsession with trivia that can turn a politician not recognising a TV presenter into a “three-day story” is a common condition among British political journalists that they condescendingly pretend is an affliction of “normal people”.
Hacks aren’t asking for a true ‘hinterland’ but expecting that politicians should pretend to be “like everybody else” and believing that the rest of us require that condescension. There’s a reason, as Mr Considerate pointed out on Twitter, that “Keir Starmer used to say that his favourite book was James Kelman’s A Disaffection, but on Desert Island Discs he decided he wanted ‘a detailed atlas’.”
It’s the media that’s addicted to trivia but it pretends that ‘the plebs’ demand it.
Given that Kelly previously clashed onscreen with Johnson’s extremely hands-on ‘technology lessons’ tutor Jennifer Acuri, it’s unlikely he doesn’t know who she is.
"During the last election campaign we were led to believe that Boris Johnson’s school boy Latin and claim to wind down at night by “solving a few quadratic equations” was terribly amusing."
Don't forget he makes busses too. With all the little people and everything.