The Joey Essex and Nick Clegg ‘selfie’ portrays a political system in crisis

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/31/joey-essex-nick-clegg-political-system-crisis

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Nick Leg. That’s how I’ll remember him. Soon, the leader of the Liberal Democrats may be glad if people talk about him by whatever name they like – for in this election the abyss beckons for a generation of politicians who never made enough people care who they are, what they do or if they vanish from public life after 7 May.

Already, Clegg seems to be practising for a life of D-list celebrity. He happily posed with former The Only Way is Essex star Joey Essex for a selfie, even though Essex admits he used to think Clegg’s surname was Leg and claims to have thought the Liberal Democrats were called Liberal Democats.

Related: The day Joey Essex hijacked the Liberal Democrats' campaign tour

If you believe he really thought that, you’ll believe David Cameron’s claim that Labour spending plans will cost every taxpayer at least £3bn. Essex is clearly stupid as a profession. It probably took a team of scriptwriters and three meetings with executive producers to come up with the line about Liberal Demo-cats. His meeting with Clegg was the first of a series of encounters with party leaders for a Joey Essex election special.

In this photograph of them posing together for a selfie, Clegg looks as jaded and mind-numbed as if he has been on the hustings for five weeks – not a good look for the very first day of the election campaign. As an image, this makes me think of bleak German Renaissance paintings of Youth and Age, or even Death and the Maiden. Here are the ill-assorted couple, one with a future, the other near the end of the road.

Essex looks bright-eyed and young, with a big future, so long as professional idiocy remains a lucrative line. Clegg meanwhile stares fixedly into the lens as if he were gazing into an ashen mirror. But above all, Essex looks the smarter of the two. It is self-evidently desperate and passive for Clegg to pretend to be amused by this reality TV star’s phoney jokes and to pose for a selfie as if he’s got nothing better to do, and no better way to connect with the people.

In this, he simply represents the entire political cohort that goes to the slaughter on 7 May. An electorate that has come to despise its politicians looks set to humiliate and torture them all with the agony of a hung parliament followed by agonising coalition negotiations or a feeble minority government. They are all losers – not like winner Joey Essex in his casual wear and haircut.

British politics has lost the ability to communicate with voters. To make voters care. That is what we see in this picture. Would Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair ever have posed with Joey Essex for a selfie, or indulged his daft questions? Of course not, because they both were able, at their best, to talk directly with real people. Blair – whose Machiavellian understanding of modern politics can scarcely be denied – points out in his autobiography that most people simply do not know or care what politicians are doing most of the time. To forget that is death for an electoral politician – and our politicians have forgotten it.

Joey Essex – or his writers – have made the very same point as Blair by apparently not knowing Clegg’s name. That is not ignorance or insult but simple realism. The introspective concerns of today’s Westminster have no purchase on the public – does anyone outside the political elite know why the government tried to unseat speaker John Bercow as one of its final acts before calling the election? Seriously, what was that about? This photograph of Nick Leg, or whoever he is, posing with a man he desperately hopes has a youthful following, is a picture of a leader who has no real grasp on popular communication trying to hitch a lift with someone who does get some kind of message across to someone.

As an image of the crisis in our political system this ranks with Ed Miliband’s sandwich-eating debacle and David Cameron’s epic series of bizarre beach snaps – publicised in the apparent belief that seeing how many holidays he takes makes him look like a normal bloke. It is not the photo opps themselves that are dreadful, so much as the unease they betray with the very essence of democratic leadership – the task of speaking for and to the people.

Cameron’s regiment of hired claqueurs in the Tory press portray him as a true communicator, but he speaks only to those who admire a posh voice. Labour’s first election broadcast this week recognised the deficit in popular oratory among today’s professional politicians – it brought in an actor who excels at seeming ordinary. Martin Freeman spoke directly and humanly about what he believes. Why can’t the candidates do that?

Instead they pose with Joey Essex, looking like they’re in hell, as they face the awful gulf that has opened up between Westminster and the people, as the voters prepare to pulp parliament into a grey sludge of powerless mediocrity.