LIKE it or not, when you go into public life you become a role model. You are judged by different standards. You are meant to set a good example. That’s the deal.
This last little while so many people have either forgotten it, flouted it, or just plain old binned it.
The most flagrant offender, as we know, is the often bankrupt, showman and compulsive liar who, for reasons so many people still can’t compute, is apparently the current President of the United States.
As an exemplar of good behaviour, someone to whose conduct you might want to refer an errant teenager, he ranks somewhere between Darth Vader and Dr Strangelove.
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He revels in being ever more outrageous, ever more offensive, ever more insensitive.
He is, in short, a thoroughly nasty human being.
That much we all knew. But since the onset of the pandemic he has also become lethally dangerous.
First of all playing down the seriousness of Covid 19 – though taped interviews suggests he knew months ago how deadly it can be – then over-riding the advice of the scientific community, and routinely railing against and ridiculing those states and governors who were trying to send out essential messaging on public health.
When Boris Johnson caught the virus, a legislator who had once been cavalier about the necessity for urgent action, got a bad scare and got the message.
It may have gone against every instinct of a man given to self-indulgent hedonism, but he seemed to take on on board a sharp lesson that this bug wasn’t kidding.
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Not so The Donald. Careless to the last about the health and wellbeing of both colleagues and the nation at large, his last act before testing positive was to hold a largely maskless “superspreader” in the Rose Garden, which has left many of his team now sick and sidelined.
Even hospitalised, his every instinct was to make media capital out of his plight, insisting on leaving the premises to drive past those die hard supporters who, for reasons best known to themselves, had loitered outside the hospital bearing Trumpian paraphernalia.
Truly it is more than a common language which separates us.
The desperation evidenced by his “do anything, say anything” naked desire to cling to office has not just endangered the health of countless thousands of his own nation, but arguably his own too.
It’s difficult to believe his doctors thought it a smart move for him to be helicoptered back to the White House lawn in order to have the home movie featured on the nightly news channels.
We have many instances of public figures screwing up on this side of the pond. Alongside the great pretender, they are merely amateur scoundrels.
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