David Cameron's rubbish - 15/04/07
I’ve had occasion to slag off Dave Cameron before for pretending he doesn’t live in Notting Hill because he thinks it’s too posh for the British electorate. This is rich since he has another slight hurdle to jump in his drive to seem ordinary – he’s an Old Etonian. But my wife bumped into him on Golborne Road yesterday, in a shop far from posh.

Golborne Road, off Portobello Road, its famous cousin, is the shopping drag at the end of my street and it combines a street market with Portuguese, Lebanese and Moroccan cafés and halal butchers. There’s a sprinkling of upmarket shops and a complete lack of Starbucks and McDonalds – not enough footfall.

One of the shops is a peculiar grocery that specialises in boxes of washing powder the size of wardrobes, huge sacks of rice and a variety of domestic and exotically foreign condiments. It’s the kind of place you find in marginal or up-and-coming areas throughout London. And that’s where my wife bumped into him, with both of them pushing prams.

Now the question that springs to my mind is, what on earth makes this man want to be prime minister of Britain? He seems to live a fairly normal, if wealthy, life. Other local sightings have included the public swimming pool (where he was wearing a nicotine patch, no idea if he has succeeded in giving up the habit that Kurt Vonnegut, a life-time smoker, called ‘a fairly sure, fairly honourable form of suicide’), and a tiny, and decidedly not upmarket, Thai restaurant.

Suppose he does become prime minister? His life, and that of his family’s, will be changed forever. Never again will he be able to stroll down Golborne Road with his baby-buggy or go swimming in a public pool without four or five heavily-armed SAS minders. People all over the world, who have never previously heard of him, will desperately want to murder him.

But the fact that I can’t understand what is driving the man to this gruesome fate is probably the reason that he is a politician and I am not.

Even as a mere opposition politician, his life is already being made a misery. A few weeks ago, journalists from the tabloid Sunday Mirror (which supports Tony Blair’s Labour Party) stole his bin bags to check out how green he really was, which you might call fair game since he has made much of his environmental credentials. His new Notting Hill home has a windmill attached to the roof, which cynics have claimed, in the not especially windy Notting Hill area, will struggle to power a hair dryer.

Of course stealing bin bags to get stories is hardly a new idea. As long ago as the late 1960s, one AJ Weberman took to stealing Bob Dylan’s trash in a bid to find unique insights into the great man’s works. Dylan is rumoured to have retaliated by mixing dog shit in with his garbage.

But back to Dave’s rubbish. According to the Sunday Mirror: ‘Environment campaigners say the worst offence is the mass of disposable nappies. The Camerons add to Britain's £67 million annual "nappy mountain" by throwing out dozens of their 13-month-old son's disposables each week. Most are tied up in supermarket carrier bags which do not decompose either. Recycling expert Kay Wagland condemned the Camerons' use of disposables as an "inexcusable waste". She said: "He is contributing to a nappy nightmare when he should be setting an example.”’

Kay Wagland works for the Women’s Environmental Network, a miserable group who waste taxpayers’ and charitable cash on a variety of nonsensical green campaigns, including one that tries to persuade the British public to use cloth nappies. Read the truth about the nappy debate here.

So Dave, my friend, I say pack it all in and then you’ll be able to do what ever you want with your baby’s poo, as I do.