David Cameron is often accused of trying to steal too heavily from the Tony Blair playbook but he’s not the only one harking back to 1997. In that election, the then Tory chairman Brian Mawhinney hired an actor to dress up in chicken suit and follow Tony Blair around to highlight his refusal to take part in a leader’s debate. The confrontation ended when the Daily Mirror hired an actor to dress as a wolf and attack the Tory chicken during one such walkabout. Who says politics has got more juvenile in the last decade?
Anyway Mr Cameron – who probably wishes he had dodged the debate – is now being followed by a Mirror chicken apparently chasing him over unanswered questions. Mr Cameron today finally lost patience with the chicken although in a reasonably controlled and good-humoured way, decapitating the bird or at least ripping off its mask. More amusingly he then challenged the chicken to ask its questions; but of course, the chicken is just some poor bloke in a suit – it didn’t have any questions and looked around rather desperately for its Mirror minder.
It wasn’t a masterclass but it wasn’t a bad effort at dealing with this sort of thing – see the BBC’s video:
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey