TRYING NOT TO WIN IT BY A NOSE

Before and after

by Colin Liddell

Politicians will do anything to get elected. When he was chosen leader of the opposition Labour Party in 2010, Ed Miliband benefited from the fact that everybody was trying not to elect his better known brother, David, to the position. The next step to power, however, requires persuading a large proportion of the British public to vote for him

With the country going through economic discomfort and serious budget cuts, the opposition leader, whoever he is, should be soaring in the opinion polls. Strangely, however, Mr. Miliband has failed to catch fire with voters. Even when they express a preference for Labour, they still see its leader as a drag.

This poor performance has raised eyebrows and called forth a welter of explanations, which see the problem as either a lack of energy, ideas, direction, or whatever. Others have commented on his voice and demeanour, and there has even been a bizarre story that the problem is he does not understand the natural human desire to have a conservatory added to one’s house:

A senior Labour MP took a sideswipe at Ed Miliband yesterday for not understanding why people want a dream home with a conservatory.

Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander said anyone who failed to understand why people aspired to have a conservatory or an HD television was unfit to lead the Labour Party.

This is a revealing pattern. Whenever one notices a proliferation of explanations that don't quite hit the mark, one can be sure that there is a real explanation for the phenomenon that people simply don't feel comfortable talking about.

In today's enriched multicultural Britain, one wonders what this can be. No doubt we would have been scratching our heads on this one till doomsday if Mr. Miliband had not unwittingly pointed to it himself through some pretty drastic nose surgery: Yes, it seems the British voter is not 100% happy about voting for a Jew with a big nose.

Recent pictures of Miliband taken in profile show that he now has a completely different nose from the one he had last year, switching from a more pronounced, Semitic-looking nose, in keeping with his racial background, to something more generic, resembling that of an ex-boxer.

Just like the strange 'autumn years' marriage of Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and gunning to become Prime Minister, we can safely conclude that this radical transformation was undertaken because he sees it as a vote winner and a necessary cross to bear in pursuit of the ultimate goal.

Because a politician having plastic surgery to win votes lacks the desired ring of integrity, Miliband has had to find a plausible medical cover for his cosmetic makeover. According to awkwardly jokey press releases and speeches, it is supposedly because of a deviated nasal septum, the kind of condition, the mere mention of which is enough to deflect further enquiry while eliciting a sympathetic shrug from the medically illiterate masses.

It is however immensely interesting that correcting the position of something whose function is to internally separate the left and right nasal passages should, as a curious side effect, also alter someone’s profile to such an extent. Likewise it is odd bordering on quaint that this medical condition only became serious enough to warrant an operation after Miliband gained the leadership of the Labour Party.

What it boils down to is that Miliband views himself as very much a Jewish-looking Jew, and that, in the absence of the kind of compensating advantages that Britain's first and only Jewish PM Benjamin Disraeli had, he expects this to count against him with the voters. It's not even necessary for the mass of voters to identify him as specifically Jewish. They just see him on the TV and conclude at some gut level that he's not one of them and resistance sets in. By changing his 'ethnic profile' in this way he is effectively denouncing the British electorate as a bunch of racists.

Unlike Obama in America, he can't latch onto White guilt or the White fantasy of making the poor little African boy's dream come true. Miliband is not exotic enough for that. His best bet is to downplay his Jewishness, and seem as British as possible. So, suddenly, we are told that his septum is "deviating," and then a few months later he's altogether more "Goyish" looking. How convenient for dealing with those low-information voters who go on looks!

Perhaps now, with his less noticeably Semitic nose, critics will mysteriously start to discern energy, ideas, and charisma in his leadership that were not there before. But before that happens, I suspect he might have to discover a whole host of new medical maladies so that the vote-winning cosmetic surgery and other alterations can continue indefinitely.