Don’t you know? OK, well how much is (the maximum) Housing Benefit, then? Council Tax benefit? Income Support? Come on, surely you must know one of these! OK, then, pick any benefit you like that you are not personally in receipt of, and tell me how much it is.
No doubt a visitor or two to this site will be able to take up this challenge, and give an answer to one of these questions (and I’m aware that anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the internet should be able to find them all in seconds). But if more than a handful are able to do so genuinely off the top of their head, then I’ll eat, well, I don’t know, the mouldy chocolate I was presented with from an exhibitor’s stall in Bournemouth earlier this week.
If you’re one of those who couldn’t answer them, then you are completely out of touch with everything that is happening in modern Britain, you have no right to contribute to public life, and should withdraw forthwith to the embattled ivory tower you are surely already living in. So say political opponents and the press (a not entirely co-extensive two categories of people, but shall we say not as distinct as they might be).
Clearly Nick made a boo-boo, not merely not knowing the current level of the state pension but being out by a factor of three. When you get something like that as wrong as that, you do indeed make yourself look pretty silly. If I were a political opponent invited to comment then the press quote clearly pretty much writes itself on an occasion like this.
As always, the 20-20 vision of hindsight is a wonderful thing, but clearly he should have just owned up to not knowing, rather than tried to guess. He should not have got the answer to this question quite so badly wrong.
But going up a level from this error, the way in which the media do now expect, especially at election time, leaders of all parties to know what’s number one at the moment, who plays in goal for England, who’s illicitly seeing whom in EastEnders, and who won Big Brother last year , down to whether Cheryl Cole is back with Ashley at the moment, does seem to me rather silly.
It’s not difficult for the press to portray the inability to answer any of these as “out of touch”, but really, this game has everything to do with sport (in the hunting, rather than Premier League, sense) and not very much to do with quite a lot of things that one might reasonably expect politicians ought to be devoting most of their attention to. Keeping in touch with other people’s lives is one thing, but sometimes it feels as if some parts of the media want politicians to be fulltime watchers of television soap operas.
The level of the state pension is not, I accept, in quite that category. But there still does seem to me an issue about the level of detailed knowledge of every area of national life, that most of us wouldn’t pretend to have, that we can reasonably expect from our leading politicians, of all parties.
However given what I once heard referred to as the “well-developed herd mentality” of our national media, I think Gordon and Dave should watch out over the next couple of weeks. Now they’ve scented blood, humiliating leading politicians for not being able to identify which colour bag cheese and onion crisps currently come in, will surely become briefly a very popular pastime on the airwaves.
Parts of the media will no doubt believe that as well as keeping track of exactly how many of his own MPs are now opposing him, and ensuring a bankrupt bank doesn’t torpedo the entire British financial system, our Prime Minister should spend the weekend before conference week’s media appearances mugging up on the precise cost of a pint of milk in Middlesbrough at the moment.