Personally, I have to say that I don’t think celebrities make good party leaders or Prime Ministers. This has nothing to do with what they do on TV but everything to do with their lives in general.
Before I am accused of prejudice, I should say that not only are some of my best friends celebrities, but probably most of them are. I work in the media, for goodness sake. It is precisely because I know such a lot of celebrities that I can say that I don’t think many of them are capable of representing the interests of the vast majority of people.
Their lifestyles are too divorced from the norm. They are not better or worse, but they are different. I have celebrity friends whose biggest headache is whether to have a black sofa or a cream one.
My celebrity friends have not sat in accident and emergency with a small child. They have not had to make the decision over whether to give them MMR. They have not struggled to get their child statemented or gone through the schools’ appeals process. They have people to do all that for them.
Without these experiences at the sharp end of our public services, they do not know how they function. This makes them completely out of their depth in administering them. In the same way that career politicians, those who have never had a real job but climbed the greasy pole by way of think-tanks and speech writing, are not equipped to make laws for the rest of us, so I think celebrities are ill-suited to representing the interests of the population in general. However much I love my celebrity friends, I don’t want them running the country.
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