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Miliband must show rather than tell people what he believes

Politicians like dressing up: it is one of the many things they have in common with children. Prime ministers wear flak jackets on visits to military bases to exude strength. For chancellors, the costume of choice is Bob the Builder. Nothing says "getting the job done" like a hard hat and high-visibility jacket. In the days before last November's autumn statement on the economy, George Osborne - usually sparing in his TV appearances - kept showing up on construction sites looking as if he had leapt from the cabin of a JCB to share some thoughts on infrastructure investment.
Nick Clegg also likes to get his overalls on for the camera, admiring the craftsmanship of industrious youths freshly redeemed from the dole by a government-funded apprenticeship.
The logic is simple. Most people, most of the time, pay no attention to politics. When they do, they forget what is said. Promises are presumed worthless. Voters do not want to hear boastful claims about what politicians think they have achieved. The attitude, as one Downing Street strategist puts it, is "show me, don't tell me".
That adage, borrowed from the world of marketing, is well understood by David Cameron, whose only job outside politics was in public relations. His campaign to "decontaminate" the Tory brand in opposition generated the most famous fancy-dress outing in recent political history: the Conservative leader as polar explorer, fretting about climate change with sympathetic huskies.
Toxic stew
Now Cameron probably wishes he could dress up as a doctor and be filmed performing life-saving surgery. He urgently needs to look like someone who cares about the NHS. Before the election, he promised to protect the health service from painful budget squeezes and disruptive bureaucratic reconfigurations. He is inflicting both, thus reinforcing a lingering suspicion that the Conservative Party's instinct is to vandalise a treasured national institution.
This is an extraordinary lapse for a Prime Minister who is respected even by his enemies as a deft manager of public opinion. The failure is twofold. First, Cameron did not pay adequate attention to the toxic stew that Andrew Lansley was cooking up at the Department of Health. Then, as a rancid stench filled the air, the Prime Minister, reluctant to perform a U-turn and confident in his powers of persuasion, thought he could sell it to the public anyway. He can't.
The painful truth about voters' trust in Cameron where the NHS is concerned is that it rested not so much on what the Conservative leader had said but on the way his message was made personal by the experience of caring for a severely disabled son and by the agony of losing him.

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