A Bit Weird?

I know that the media in this country have a right-wing bias, skewing their reporting. opinion polls and editorial content to paint the right in as favourable a light as possible, but are they really so scared that Labour might actually win next year's general election that they have to resort to these latest pathetic attempts to discredit Ed Miliband?  What purpose can there be in opinion polls which ask respondents whether they think the Labour leader is 'a bit weird'?  Since when has there been an official scale of weirdness?  How do they define it?   Who gets to decide what constitutes 'weird' and what constitutes 'normal'.  It is purely subjective - I think it weird that anyone would vote Tory, for instance. This is such a crude attempt to manipulate public perceptions of the leader of the opposition in the run-up to an election it is barely believable.  The whole thing is clearly predicated on the 'fact' that Miliband looks like the Daily Mail's idea of what a 'geek' is and, hey, 'geeks' are weird, aren't they?  And being weird is bad.  So bad that weird people are obviously unfit to be a potential Prime Minister.

This poll might have had more credibility if it had asked respondents similar questions about the perceived characteristics of the other party leaders.  I mean, in the interest of balance, did the opinion poll ask potential voters 'do you think David Cameron is, well, a bit of a cunt?' (I think he'd score quite highly on that measure).  After all, that's surely just as relevant to the issue of who should govern Britain as how weird Ed Miliband allegedly is.  Obviously, as ever, this poll and how it 'proves' that voters think Miliband is weird has been gleefully (and uncritically) seized upon by the media and repeated ad nauseum.  Nowhere, of course, is the really importnant question asked: even if Miliband is weird, so what?  Do people actually care?  After all, we currently have a cabinet full of weird bastards - bonkers Gove, gross wobble-bottom Pickles to name but a few - yet the likes of the Daily Mail don't seem to think that they are unfit to govern.  Quite the opposite, in fact.