Proof positive that it’s the latter half of August—when just about everyone is on vacation, or ought to be—arrived this week with the news that the latest social media sensation in Great Britain is a clandestine video of Prime Minister David Cameron.
It was filmed by a teenage girl named Ashleigh on an Easyjet flight from London to Algarve, Portugal, and shows Cameron sitting among his bodyguards, tapping on his iPad – and eating from a package of paprika-flavored Pringles potato chips. “The prime minister was three seats away from me,” Ashleigh tweeted to her followers, “eating paprika Pringles. Help me.” A few moments later: “Guys, I’m crying. He was eating Pringles.”
Ashleigh’s Twitter cri de coeur swiftly went viral—and this being the second decade of the 21st century, soon became a meme on social media and the subject of much chin-wagging in the press. The sight of the prime minister transferring a paprika-flavored chip from its package to his mouth served as an all-purpose metaphor for Cameron, for the governing Conservative party, for the state of politics and public life in modern Britain, and of course, as a partisan cudgel. Why was the prime minister traveling on a budget? airline? Was he working on his iPad, or merely amusing himself? One tendentious Guardian reporter (but I repeat myself) sarcastically declared that the combination of elements—the cheap flight, the budget destination, the Pringles—meant that “Dave’s ‘Man of the People’ game is STRONG.”
Well, let us concede that few politicians—few human beings, for that matter—look especially appealing when eating. Cameron was the source of much merriment during the recent election campaign when he was photographed dining on what appeared to be a hot dog with knife and fork. And his Labour rival, Ed Miliband, was caught on camera at one point struggling to consume a sandwich. But let us also concede that even politicians have to take nourishment, and in this instance at least, Cameron was eating in what he must have assumed was privacy.
There is another way of looking at it as well. David Cameron is the highest-ranking elected official in Great Britain; and yet he is not only traveling to meet his wife and children on vacation on a budget airline, but in an economy seat as well. Indeed, the very fact that the very ordinary Ashleigh could gaze upon him just a few feet across the aisle, and take a selfie with Cameron in the background —wearing earphones and punching furiously on his iPad—is unimaginable over here. When our First Family travels to Martha’s Vineyard, for example, it is not on the American equivalent of Easyjet but on Air Force One, and at considerable taxpayer expense. And if Ashleigh were to take a selfie featuring President Obama, she would likely be wrestled to the floor by the Secret Service and charged with any number of felonies.
Only a Guardian reporter, after all, would perceive the PM’s modest travel arrangements as a cynical ploy. No doubt, he believes that someone of Cameron’s wealth and upper-class status would ordinarily prefer to travel on a yacht, or in a horse-drawn coach; and to Monte Carlo and not Algarve—perhaps reclining in top hat and spats while retainers feed him paprika-flavored Pringles, one by one.
