I have just watched the last images of the election campaign on the Ten O’Clock News on the BBC. David Cameron was surrounded by some seriously off-putting party apparatchiks (why not choose some of the perfectly presentable and normal-looking young people for CCHQ rather than these awful gargoyles?), meanwhile Gordon Brown was struggling to fill a room and Nick Clegg was being mobbed.
I remember a Labour spin doctor (OK it was Damian McBride) telling me that he knew Gordon could never win a beauty contest against David Cameron. He didn’t seem to have twigged that modern elections are beauty contests – that is one of the reasons Tony Blair did so well against the considerably less beautiful John Major, William Hague and Michael Howard.
Of course this has been a beauty contest. People vote with their guts in a general election.
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