A rant about the Mirror

Read this.

The Mirror is having a field day about a comment Cameron may have made to his to his four year-old daughter, Nancy. He supposedly said: “You look like you’ve fallen out of a council flat.”

The quotation was provided by ’senior political sources’ - wow, those big-shot politicos really can’t have anything better to do than report on Cameron’s banter with his children…

I doubt that he actually said it, and one of the Mirror’s sources seems to have gone back on themselves (a senior female TV journalist no less). He denies it, and his office denies it. The use of an uncorroborated anonymous source seems suspicious at best.

Even if he did say it, what business is it of anyone else how he speaks within his own home?

I resent the cheap, sensationalist approach of the Mirror, throwing in pointless details about Cameron’s wealth.

The inverse snobbery abounds… the second sentence refers to his ‘£2m West London home’. Later attention is brought to the fact that ‘The former PR man lives in a £2million mortgage-free home in West London, and has a country house in Oxfordshire worth £1million.’ The Mirror is quick to warn us that

‘Mr Cameron is far from the man of the people he likes to claim. He is descended from King William IV, making him a distant relative of the Queen.

Wife Sam, 36, is the creative director of upmarket stationery company Smythson of Bond Street. Her stepfather is Viscount Astor and she is a direct descendant of Nell Gywn, mistress to Charles II.’

What is the point? How does this contribute to the ’story’? The Mirror is effectively saying, we don’t like him because he’s rich.

This is not a story, and it certainly isn’t the ‘political storm’ which the headline refers to. In my view this is a fabricated attempt to embarrass Cameron. But it is too late, the article is wrong to assert that Cameron ‘desperately needs to shake off his rich, Eton-educated image’. He has already sucessfully done so. Opinion polls show that Cameron has moved past the ‘wow, he’s a toff’ stage and he is actually popular.

Shame on the Mirror for printing such trash.