Dylan Jones: 'Some people in Hollywood know who Gordon Brown is – but few could pull him out of a line-up'
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Your support makes all the difference.Los Angeles might be a long way from Downing Street, although if you ask around the city you'll soon discover that a lot of people here assume no one lives there any more. Downing Street that is, not the City of Angels. For while the G20 generated acres of media coverage in California, the US media simply couldn't believe the UK papers, and imagined there'd been some sort of transatlantic morphing, and that instead of Barack and Michelle Obama stepping down from their plane at Stansted, they had been digitally subsumed into an uncomfortable fusion of JFK and Princess Diana.
Oh, and there was all the business with the Queen, of course, but no one appeared to notice the dour Scot with the dodgy calculator and the rictus grin. He was invisible. "No Californian knows who Gordon Brown is," I was told as I sat in a bar adjacent to the American Idol studio. "He is a phantom." The next day, picking at a salad in The Ivy on Robertson, the story was the same, my guest refusing to believe that anyone in the movie industry had any idea what the Prime Minister looked like. "I'm fairly sure there are some people in Hollywood who know he's unelectable, but I doubt many could pull him out of a line-up."
A pollster I bumped into in Santa Monica certainly knew who Brown was, and although he was predictably disparaging about his chances, he was surprisingly circumspect about the Tories too. "They need to step up to the plate, although not in the way most people think. They need to stop being so political, and stop rushing around the place trying to make headlines. You journalists kill them for it but they've got to resist giving too much detail. Policy will kill them. Be big, be statesmanlike, but step back."
These days, the ex-pats here hang out at Cecconi's, the old Mortons site, and many feel sympathy for Brown. "He means well, but he can't escape the fact that, as far as the economy is concerned, his hands are all over it. You can't doubt his commitment or his sincerity, but the truth of the matter is, he hasn't served his people well."
As any politician knows, sometimes it pays to be invisible. Even in California.
Dylan Jones is the editor of 'GQ'
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