Sinclair McKay says the Tory leader could do worse than emulate his fellow Old Etonian — the elegant, ruthless, cucumber-cool TV hero John Steed
Who is David Cameron’s role model? No one quite knows. Of course Dave would like to be a British Obama, but that’s a little far-fetched (for obvious reasons), so here’s another candidate, just as cool as the President but more up Cameron’s street. Like Cameron he’s an Old Etonian but a social progressive; like Cameron he’s a fashionable man-about-town. Basically, Dave couldn’t have a better hero than John Steed of The Avengers. Steed’s an example of how an unabashed posh chap can win over the entire British nation — plus the US as well. Indeed, a close viewing of Steed’s exploits could provide Mr Cameron with many useful top tips for power.
You remember The Avengers. As its star Patrick Macnee once remarked, it was a series about ‘a man who wears a bowler hat and a woman who throws men over her shoulder’. Those women, incidentally — Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) and Tara King (Linda Thorson) — helped to make Margaret Thatcher’s premiership possible. No one could doubt the ability of a woman to lead once they had seen Mrs Peel take charge of a crisis. Even if Mrs Thatcher never demonstrated any aptitude for balletic kung-fu.
But back to Mr Cameron and Mr Steed. Running from 1961 to 1969 (and resurrected in the form of The New Avengers in 1976, but let’s not go there), The Avengers was an outlandish, often expressionistic comedy thriller, ostensibly about spies, but really about England. And about class.
The villains were diabolical scientists or enemy agents or, more strikingly, people maddened by old traditions dying out.
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