Poster Own Goal

by Graham Davies

The Millibands are a rather strained double-act at the best of times. If one brother ever challenged for the leadership of the Labour Party, he certainly could not be certain of the other brother's support.....unless they had come to a highly specific, preferably written and witnessed, agreement about it.

They looked deliciously uncomfortable on Sky News, trying to defend Labour's latest election poster. It depicts David Cameron sitting on top of an Audi Quattro, looking like a younger, cooler version of the iconic 1980s policeman, Gene Hunt.

Their contention was that the poster cleverly illustrated the electorate's fear that a Cameron government would turn the clock back a couple of decades. The problem is that this is precisely what a significant proportion of floating voters would like: a return to the robust business-oriented prosperity that epitomised the heyday of the last Tory regime.

But their limp defence highlighted something more presentationally profound than that: if you have to explain why something is funny and clever, then it really isn't all that funny or clever.

I hope that policians never really grasp this....because the blind spot they have for comedy is one of the things that can actually make some of their more ridiculous pronouncements rather entertaining for the rest of us.