No laughing matter

On backslapping Heads of State and giggly diplomats.

There is something a little alarming in watching world leaders and statesmen pretending to be men and women ‘of the people’, arranging to be photographed cracking jokes and having a chuckle together.

Until quite recent times governing and deciding the destinies of nations and entire continents was held to be quite a serious business, one to be conducted by grave and sober individuals and not by backslapping comedians or bare-chested Russian Presidents wrestling tigers.

Though it is easy to attribute the trend to the Americanization of electoral politics, the best known stunts of this nature have had totalitarian roots: a shirtless Mussolini harvesting grain, or Mao Tse Tung’s famous – and unlikely – 15 kilometre swim across the Yangtze River in just 65 quick minutes: this at age 73. It is difficult to imagine Bismarck, Palmerston, Talleyrand or the Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin briefly donning a yellow hardhat to have a beer with the ‘boys’ down at the steel mill or doing a great deal of baby kissing, much less swimming across broad rivers in record-breaking time.

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