David Cameron, The Fat Controller

Lucy Mangan: David Cameron, the fat controller

Is it just me, or has David Cameron been piling on the pounds of late?
Lucy Mangan
6 January 2012

The fat of the land: Is it just Lucy Mangan's imagination, or does the British prime minister seem to be carrying round extra weight these days?

It's taken me a while – mostly because I instinctively begin hawking phlegm at the screen the moment he comes into view and the image is rapidly obscured – but I have at last pinpointed why the sight of David Cameron is becoming more unsettling. (The hateful sound, of course, has always been easy to explain – there are the words, of course, and then the way they spill fruitily forth from his wet-lipped mouth like rotting, weeping plums.)

It's because he's getting fatter. Not massively, not obscenely so – just gently, calmly and inexorably. His lips say we're all in this together, but his face says, "I'm lying. Fatly." And by their BMIs shall ye truly know them. While Obama gets leaner and tauter by the day, suggesting a man stretched on the rack of his country's woes, Cameron inflates. Even Tony Blair had the grace to look a little drawn as he made the decision to go to war with Iraq. And Nick Clegg's descent from bright-eyed, brush-haired neophyte to walking man-husk, life and hope drained from his eyes through the holes punched in his soul by auto-treachery and self-delusion is too well-documented to need repeating here. But at least, as we enter the Age of Austerity, he will look at one with his increasingly grey and embattled electorate.

Cameron's engorged appearance leads one to theorise three things. First, that he is a Doctor Who CGI monster and that 2012 will be the year we discover we are all living in a Steven Moffat script, which would be truly excellent news but, I must reluctantly admit, in the final analysis unlikely. Second, that our leaders' respective appearances signify simply that he is feeding off the essence of Nick Clegg and that Christmas 2012 will see the Cameroonian kids getting a new skin-bag to play with. Or third, that this year will be the year the boss class is finally rumbled.

Written, aural and oral means of fomenting outrage and rebellion do not seem to work as well as they might. You can list all the 23 out of 29 millionaires that make up the Cabinet until you're blue in the face; tell voters their MP tried to buy a floating sodding duck house (for his ducks. Which live on his garden's lake) with their money; write reams unpicking the knotty mass of old school ties that forms our government; or carefully outline the reneging on promises to tax the rich, or punish (even in the loosest sense of "perhaps not too obviously and ostentatiously over-reward") those responsible for creating the financial crisis… And everyone skims briefly over them, thinks "Yep, sounds about right", and goes about his or her business.

But visual stimuli are different – more intense, more immediate. They cut through the cant and the crap. As we begin the year with news that charity food banks are proliferating throughout the country to cope with the increasing numbers of people who cannot afford to feed themselves or their families, you have to hope that the corpulence of Cameron et al will start to tell its own story. Naturally, it would be nice if the final dawning of the light was triggered at some massive public event – in my ideal world, it involves Cameron at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games forgetting himself for just long enough to laugh at some Old Etonian joke huffety-puffeted out by Boris Johnson as they wheezily mount the stage together – but a gradual realisation will do. And what a happy new year that will be. Gruniad