Easy Riders

There are some politicians who are often given an unfairly easy ride by the media, getting away with being portrayed as genial eccentrics or 'outsiders', despite the fact that they actually espouse extreme policies.  The media likes to present them as jovial jokesters we all like to laugh at - a bit off message but essentially harmless.  In doing so, they conveniently ignore what these 'characters' are actually proposing.  This isn't just confined to well known national politicians.  In the aftermath of UKIP's over-hyped 'success' in the recent local elections, for instance, I saw a supposedly light-hearted item on the ever awful One Show, focusing on a woman who had stood as a UKIP candidate against her Tory son-in-law for a council seat.  She admitted that she had stood previously, for other parties, most recently the English Defence League (EDL).  Now, the interviewer let this go unchallenged, failing to point out that the EDL are essentially neo-Nazis and failing to ask whether she still agreed with their policies or whether she'd joined UKIP because she thought the EDL were too moderate. 

However, it is generally national politicians who are given this ride, most notably Boris Johnson and UKIP's Nigel Farage.  Because they are treated by the media as 'cheeky chappies', cuddly anti-politicians, even, they are able to evade the kind of rigourous questioning that the likes of Miliband, Cameron and Clegg, for instance, are subjected to on a regular basis.  Consequently, we are never able to see how they respond to pressure when faced with difficult questions.  Nevertheless, very occasionally they do come spectacularly and very publically unstuck.  Boris Johnson's interview with Eddie Mair, culminating in Mair accusing a bewildered-looking Boris of being 'a nasty piece of work', springs to mind.  This week, of course, it was Farage's turn to become unstuck in Scotland, finding himself besieged in an Edinburgh pub by a mob of Scots nationalists, eventually emerging to accuse them of racism (they were allegedly anti-English), and hanging up on a BBC radio interviewer.  All-in-all, not quite the media image of genial gentleman eccentric he likes to perpetuate.

I have to say, I can't really see what Farage is getting so upset about - English comedians have traditionally been given a hard time in Scotland.  Back in the fifties extravagantly moustachioed comic Jimmy Edwards allegedly set foot on stage in Glasgow to be greeted with the heckle, 'Fuck off back to England, you Sassenach bastard!'  So he did, leaving the theatre immediately and catching the first train South. Or so the story goes.  Anyway, Farage should  surely have welcomed the fact that it was a pub he was trapped in - he likes to be photographed drinking pints of beer in traditional pub surroundings.  Indeed, the media likes to describe him as the sort of bloke you might meet in the average lounge bar.  In fact, he's exactly the sort of bloke who drives me out of the lounge bar with his ignorant and loud 'opinions' and encourages me to stay at home instead, with a load of that cheap booze from Tesco, watching a DVD in peace.  No wonder our bloody pubs are dying!