David Cameron via.
In the campaigning for last month’s British election, the prize for most bizarre stunt would have to go to the limestone slab which the leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband, had engraved with six vague promises taken from the Labour manifesto and signed by himself, and which he promised to have installed in the garden of 10 Downing Street so that he could see it through the window from his putatively prime ministerial desk. Alas, at least partly on account of the ridiculousness of this attempt to impersonate Moses the law-giver, he never got to occupy that desk or view the admonishment of the stone tablet whose post-election fate remains unclear—though various jokers have pretended to sell it on eBay for derisory sums. Yet the attempt to have Labour’s agenda literally set in stone suggests that, at some level, Mr. Miliband must have been dimly aware of the problem that eventually sunk the Labour campaign, namely that people didn’t trust him or his party. Or they trusted him even less than they trusted his victorious rival, David Cameron.
Equally revealing, perhaps, was the public demonstration of feeling that was the runner-up to the tablet of stone in the stunt stakes. This came at the end of a curious televised “debate” in which—as the two leaders of the governing coalition—Mr. Cameron and Nick Clegg, had declined to participate, Mr. Miliband faced off against Nigel Farage, representing the anti-immigration, anti-EU party UKIP,