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Faking sincerity

At the end of his 1970s TV show the British impressionist, Mike Yarwood, would stop aping Prime Ministers Wilson and Heath and bashfully deliver his catchphrase, “Now this is me,” before performing a song in his own voice, badly.

The speeches of both Gordon Brown and David Cameron to their party conferences were a version of that Yarwood moment. Having entertained the audience in recent weeks with their impressions of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, they aimed to reveal the ordinary and appealing bloke who lay beneath the pelt of professional pretence.

The difficulty, as Mr. Yarwood demonstrated when unease with showbiz led him to a very early retirement, is that performers can never really be themselves in public.

In the same way, Mr. Brown and Mr. Cameron were spinning themselves as politicians who had dispensed with spin. Polls show that voters find Mr. Brown sincere and honest — in an implied contrast with the actorish Mr. Blair — and yet the previous Prime Minister’s persona scarcely changed across 13 years of leading party and country, whereas the current Prime Minister, compared to his glowering chancellorship, looks like an emergency construct: new clothes, hair and voice, like the makeover scene in Evita. And the Conservative leader’s apology for going without notes — “it may be messy, but it will be me” — was calculated spontaneity, rehearsed until it squeaked.

It isn’t clear why memorising a speech should be regarded as more authentic than reading an autocue, especially as turning the speech into a feat of recall brings the experience closer to acting. Yet this obsession, in both main parties, with making the leader seem “real” and “authentic” results from a perception that normality wins elections.

In U.S. politics, this bias towards the regular guy is expressed as the “beer test.” While studies have shown that elections are usually won by the candidate with most hair, the most reliable indicator has been polls asking voters who they’d rather have round for a drink or a barbecue. The measure is tempting because it can explain why George W. Bush twice beat cleverer and more politically experienced men: Al Gore and John Kerry. Mr. Brown would scrape through on the drinkability division because the beer test is largely a judgment of class. In politics, as in television drama, “authentic” means plausibly proletarian. Bill Clinton and the second Bush seemed more blue-collar and middle American than their veteran senatorial opponents. It seems improbable that, in modern Britain, an Old Etonian could ever win the beer test. But, in the hope that he might, he must match Mr. Brown vowel by vowel as they struggle to impersonate Mr. Yarwood’s “And now this is me.” As movie mogul Sam Goldwyn is reputed to have said: if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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