David Cameron’s competitive spirit makes him the butt of many jokes. Spain’s former Socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero recalls jogging with the Tory premier at a G20 summit in Seoul. It was supposed to be a friendly run with no publicity, but after a few kilometres Zapatero spied a photographer lurking in the bushes. Suspicions were aroused when Cameron sprinted so as to be snapped in the lead. Speedy Zapatero enjoyed the last laugh, though, finishing ahead of the chubby PM, who was exhausted by the mid-route dart. Ed Miliband should take heart: an election is a marathon, not a sprint.
Alan Johnson, ageing mod, is one of the biggest draws on the campaign circuit. The one-time postie gives a persuasive account of the last Labour government. He’s also entertaining. In Cardiff he recalled delivering letters in a Berkshire village, an aggressive dog yapping at his ankles. The lady of the house leaned out of the window and in a posh voice trilled, “Kick his balls, kick his balls!” Al duly booted the canine’s testicles. “No, no, you silly little man,” she shrieked: “the plastic balls on the lawn.”
Perhaps the only bigger draw is Dennis Skinner. In Lincolnshire to support David “Son of John” Prescott, the Beast predicted that Two Jags, Jr could pull off a Portillo moment. Hope burns eternal . . . The Tory MP Edward Leigh’s majority in Gainsborough is 10,559. Portillo was sitting on an, ahem, 15,563 cushion. It couldn’t happen, could it?
The Scouse bruiser Ricky Tomlinson and the Tory smoothie Daniel Kawczynski are an unlikely pairing. The two will host a meeting in the MP’s constituency to support the Shrewsbury 24 Campaign. Tomlinson – a flying picket jailed on trumped-up charges after the 1972 building workers’ strike, before he found fame in Brookside Close – established a rapport with Kawczynski over a Commons brew. Forget cash from Chinese companies; consorting with trade unionists is treasonable in the eyes of Lynton Crosby.
Alastair Campbell’s early days as a hack were perfect training for playing Cameron in TV debate rehearsals with Red Ed. It isn’t the first time he’s pretended to be somebody else. A former landlord of the Peter Tavy Inn in Devon, where a young Campbell once drank, giggled that the middle-class Comical Ali posed, for street cred, as a horny-handed son of toil. His dad was a vet.
It might not be the Tories’ Black and White Ball, but Emily Thornberry is hosting a £95-a-head fundraiser with Yvette Cooper and the Harriet Harman lookalike Grayson Perry. At that price, for every ticket sold, she could hire a white Ford Transit for two days or buy four large flags of St George to drape from the restaurant’s windows.
Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror
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