While the two leading parties in our Parliament wage a sort of phony war to see who between them will aggravate the voting public least, Britain is today set on a course for a national election campaign culminating in a vote May 6th. Michael Ignatieff will, I suspect, watch with keen interest as the hitherto lackluster Gordon Brown seeks to attract a progressive constituency sufficient to further narrow the gap between the Tories and Labour.
Earlier this year the thought that Brown was in with a chance to stem the Conservative tide would have seemed ridiculous. The Tories had maintained a double digit lead in the polls for the better part of two years. Lately though David Cameron's shine has dulled considerably and the Tory lead has shrunk to as little as four points (a number likely insufficient to win a majority in the house).
The nub of the otherwise tedious Brown's appeal is class resentment pure and simple. Cameron is, in the British parlance, "posh." He went to Eton and Oxford and while at that university belonged to a stratospherically exclusive dining club whose members wore as a badge of honour their distaste for the great unwashed. Cameron has bent over backwards to appear the model middle class Brit (jogging over polo, etc., etc.), but there's no getting away from it.
In a brilliant April fool's prank The Guardian released a fake campaign poster which featured a glowering Brown (well known for his volcanic temper) accompanied by the fabulous slogan "step outside posh boy." Guardian readers were soon adding their own twist on that paper's website. My favourite: glowering Brown accompanied by the headline: "Did you spill my pint?" Fairly or unfairly, Cameron's going to have a difficult time living this down.
The hard-man affair reminds me of nothing so much as Jean Chrétien's Shawinigan handshake. In that instance Chrétien's rough handling of protester Bill Clennett earned him a bump upward in the polls. It's hard to imagine Ignatieff somehow acquiring a similar rep, especially now as he seems to be staking out territory as the great man of ideas. That said, even Trudeau managed through the course of the October crisis to acquire a reputation as a tough guy (remember " just watch me"?). So look for Ig to get a little down and dirty in the House over the coming weeks.
It couldn't hurt.