Ballroom Dancing and its Perils

There is something uniquely depressing about ministers trying to pose as regular folks: the assumption that we proles will take them to our hearts if they scoff a sausage roll or yap about their children or tell us what icons of contemporary pop their researchers have informed them it would be expedient to say they like. Daveybloke's Secretary for Cultchah and amateur Murdoch patsy, Jeremy C Hunt, has reliably taken the repellent process one step lower, by letting Michael Gove do the dirty work for him. Gove has been blathering on the radio about Hunt's addiction to Latin American dancing; which calls to the Guardian's mind Vincent Cable, but reminds me of a discourse by the noted philosopher and pundit E L Wisty concerning the career of Adolf Hitler. Hitler, we are told, was a dedicated ballroom dancer until someone cat-called, "Wie kurz du bist!" (how short you are); whereupon he became embittered, gave up ballroom dancing and turned to the seconday pleasures of wholesale war and pillage. Not that there is any real resemblance between an obsessive idealist like Hitler (or, for that matter, Wisty) and a bland flunkey like Hunt; but it just goes to show.