Cara Cepat Hamil - When David and Samantha Cameron revealed this week that they were expecting their fourth child they must have been prepared for the onslaught from Fleet Street. “Wham Bam Sam Cam’s Going to be a Mam (She’ll need a new pram)” went the front page headline in The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid, offering news that the family, who polls show is most likely to be moving into the prime minister’s official residence in Downing Street after an imminent election, would have one more member.
Buku Panduan Cara Cepat Hamil - “Samantha Cameron’s labour bombshell,” quipped The Guardian. Mr Cameron’s Conservatives are trying to unseat prime minister Gordon Brown’s ruling Labour party.
In its own peculiarly British way, the episode fits neatly into what has become the process story of this year’s election: even before it has officially begun and more than any other in Britain’s history this campaign has some very American tinges.
Personality is making a play to trump policy – and not everyone likes it.
Also, for the first time, voters will this year see the heads of the main political parties in US presidential-style live television debates in the lead-up to the election, widely expected on May 6. They are turning on their TVs on Sunday nights to discover candidates discussing dark moments in their lives in confessional, sometimes teary interviews more suited to Oprah Winfrey than the BBC’s normal political line-up.
And they are seeing the personal lives, habits and even, per this week’s Cameron family news, virility of candidates commented on vigorously in newspapers and on blogs.
The response has featured plenty of dismissive scorn from some of the country’s political elite. “He is getting so am-dram about the pram-dram,” Ann Treneman, political sketch writer for The Times, wrote of Mr Cameron this week.
“Sounds like a load of rubbish to me. . . This American style electioneering should be sent back over the Atlantic,” read one recent blog post in response to the unveiling of the rules for the three debates scheduled to take place in the coming weeks.
Just who will benefit from the change has also drawn much of the debate.
With his working wife, young family, easy charm and Clintonian agenda Tony Blair won a broad mandate in 1997 on the back of American-style personality-driven politics. But the oft-repeated argument is that Britons grew sick of his polish and when, in 2007 Mr Brown, his jowly finance minister, rose to the prime ministership they liked the latter’s gruff substance.
Mr Cameron is a telegenic 43-year-old Etonian who has been trying to modernise the once stuffy Conservative party and thereby replicate Mr Blair’s efforts to remake Labour.
He and 38-year-old Samantha, who works as creative director of Smythson, a London fashion and stationery brand, offer what can seem to be the perfect, compelling modern political family narrative.
If all goes to plan with both the election and their pregnancy, the Camerons will be adding their fourth child in September, in the middle of the UK’s annual political convention season. He will become only the second – after Mr Blair – prime minister in more than 150 years to have a new-born child in office.
News of the pregnancy has reminded voters that the Camerons lost their eldest child, six-year-old Ivan, a year ago in a personal tragedy that is widely seen to have softened Mr Cameron’s image as a fast-rising son of privilege.
Yet, it is Mr Brown and his campaign team who have for the most part been leading the charge towards confessional politics.
The prime minister used a televised interview to discuss the death at 11 days of his first child and how he proposed to his wife Sarah, a former PR executive, whom he married while he was chancellor of the exchequer.
The interview, which also featured asides on his drinking habits as a student, and the confession that his minders had ordered him to smile more drew more than 4m viewers.
Mr Cameron’s Sunday night interview this month drew 2.7m viewers and also featured Mrs Cameron’s public debut before the cameras.
The big question is how Mr Brown, Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party, will emerge from the televised debates scheduled to take place once the campaign officially gets under way.
Like their US counterparts, Britain’s political parties have done their best to negotiate rules meant to avoid any embarrassment for their candidates.
“It will be argued, reasonably enough, by the producers that the debates are something completely new and different for the British public,” wrote Dominic Lawson, a former editor of The Spectator political magazine.
“[But] It’s the equivalent of the high-minded bit during the Miss World contest in which the competing beauties tell us what they would do to make the world a better place,” he added. “At the end of it all, across the nation, millions of voters will stagger away from their television sets saying, ‘Is that it?’”
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