How to regain your reputation with one simple sentence

Clint Eastwood. What a guy.

You may recall a while ago I was one of the many who took issue with Mr Eastwood for his bizarre interview with a chair during a Republican convention in the United States. I wrote an article asking why celebrities have to belittle themselves by declaring their support for political parties, and basically said that it can’t do their reputation any good at all.

Well, it seems I misjudged the great man.

Collared by an interviewer who demanded to know what possessed him, Eastwood’s response was the stuff of legends. “If they’re stupid enough to ask me to a political convention,” he said, “they have to take whatever they get.”

Genius.

One person for whom I doubt this response would work is David Cameron, who was outed as a dunce on David Letterman’s US chat show last week.

It isn’t stupid to ask what “Magna Carta” means. After all, my next-door-neighbour’s four-year-old can work it out.

Perhaps Letterman could have started him off with something easier, though – like maybe, when his party didn’t win the election and never stated that it planned to do so, why has he sold off so much of the NHS in England to private companies, and why does he have plans to sell off so much more of it?

The old argument that it creates more choice is clearly nonsense because people were, reasonably, expecting the choice to be theirs. Instead, they have been presented with the company that has bought the contract and told, “This is your choice of NHS supplier. Don’t catch anything too serious or you’ll be paying it off for the rest of your life.”

Or, in the words of an iconic Eastwood character: “Do you feel lucky?”

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One Comment

  1. Joanna Terry October 1, 2012 at 8:20 am - Reply

    How right, under Thatchers policy of contracting out the cleaning in Hospital I was one of those unlucky people to contract MRSA, it nearly killed me. I had NO choice about that and it has cost the state since. Now that so called quite man with the backing of his party want me to choose again, this time it will be between abject poverty or slavery. Conservatives, don’t you just love ’em. NOT. Since I am not fit enough to slave it will be poverty.

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