According to a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times, only one in ten people think that Ed Miliband is too ugly to be prime minister.
I wrote on Friday that Ed Miliband was the victim of bias against his appearance. The kind of carping about his ‘geek-like’ demeanour and ‘Wallace and Gromit’ face that goes on is also the reason why David Miliband, and even Dan Jarvis, are now being touted more than ever as possible replacements.
Of course, it’s not the only reason Ed’s in trouble. But the fact that a national Sunday broadsheet has run a poll on the attractiveness of his face shows how much this kind of thing is having an impact.
The particular point I’d like to tease out of this poll is the difference between ‘ugly’ and ‘looking and sounding like a prime minister’. Daniel Finkelstein (£) has this morning defended the paper’s decision to run the poll, saying that physical attractiveness plays a measurable role in determining whether a politician is successful. His defence, though, focuses on the question about Miliband’s ugliness. He doesn’t acknowledge that the question about whether he looks prime ministerial enough runs along precisely the same lines.
‘Only one in ten people agreed that he is too ugly to be prime minister’, the Sunday Times wrote in the account of the poll, but preceded this with the statement ‘in total 70% of people think that he does not look and sounds like a prime minister’.
What do we mean by ‘look and sounds like a prime minister’? I would argue that it’s very similar to what we mean when we say a woman MP does or does not look like a ‘serious politician’. It’s about conforming to a particular level of conventional attractiveness, grooming and style of dress that we perceive to be integral to authority. Those 70% might not think Ed Miliband is objectively ugly, but perhaps they do seem to think he’s too ugly to be prime minister.
If we think there's a material difference between objective ugliness and a 'prime ministerial' appearance, we're deluding ourselves. This is just a matter of degrees - maybe Ed isn't ugly, but it certainly seems that people don't consider him attractive enough to run the country.
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