Pity professional politicians. Apart from football, an interest in which is now virtually compulsory, they don't have time to watch much television. But all are vaguely aware that many voters watch a lot. So they try to show they do too.
Chris Grayling, an ex-TV exec himself, now shadow home secretary, had a crack at sounding hip yesterday. In describing the feral jungle that is modern Britain (at least when elections loom), he suggested that parts of our inner cities are starting to look like west Baltimore in The Wire, all gun gangs and drug turf wars.
Oh dear. It's especially hard for Tories, doubly so for expensive ones such as David Cameron, triply so for really clever ones. They know voters suspect they are out of touch and so try harder. When Labour leader, John Smith, was asked a pop quiz on Five Live in the mid-90s he said he didn't know any of the answers, but was paid to worry about other things.
That takes the old-fashioned confidence of a Churchill or an Attlee. Nowadays they struggle. Tory strategists reveal they are targeting voters as "Holby City women" and talk of restructuring Downing St to make it feel more like the fictional West Wing.
There's a generational issue here. The last power generation of Etonians lost office in the 60s and didn't pretend to be other than elitist. It was Labour's Harold Wilson who played the Beatles (never the Stones) card. Margaret Thatcher neither knew nor cared about Monty Python and had to be bullied into using the "dead parrot" joke (which she didn't get). Tony Blair could fake it (don't mention Gordon and Arctic Monkeys), but in Blair's prime Young Fogeyism dominated the Tories' dysfunctional political culture, all tweeds, hunting and Evelyn Waugh. Cameron belongs to the iPod generation – and it shows.
