Celebrities: is there anything they can’t do? Jamie Oliver will by July have de-junked the school dinners of 55 schools, persuaded one of London’s poorest local authorities to fork out 13p extra per child’s meal and put nutrition on the election agenda. But could any of this have been achieved without a famous chef and a TV crew?

Imagine minimum-wage Greenwich dinner ladies receiving a terse political diktat that they must retrain at an army boot camp, then within weeks abandon an easy life slitting open packs of potato smileys for the drudgery of spud bashing? And we know proper cooking takes longer, says the local council, but we aren’t paying overtime, so in the first two hours of your shift you’ll be working for nada. All this after being battered with a butternut squash until you concede that for years you’ve been poisoning children — and your own family. Who wouldn’t down ladle and leg it?

And why would inner-city secondary head teachers, already dealing with truancy, disruption and underachievement, add mutinous dinner ladies, moaning McParents and kids retching up roast veg to their travails? The Greenwich schools’ catering manager, the council leader: why put your jobs on the line, risk illegal overspending or endure all that earache trying to deny the universally acknowledged truth Kids Only Eat Junk?

Television is constantly blamed for encouraging people to behave far worse than in real life — the lewd drunks of Big Brother — but little is said about how it brings out our very best selves. In exchange for a tiny sprinkling of celebrity fairy dust, ordinary people are prepared to reconsider their most deep-rooted prejudices and intractable habits, as the uplifting School Dinners showed.

Makeover TV teaches us something revolutionary, which we’d never accept from any politician: that we can change, that life needn’t be like this, we don’t have to accept cold marriages, unruly toddlers, crummy homes. I never fail to be moved when it dawns upon a slatternly mother or a distant dad on Wife Swap or Supernanny that the tiniest shift in their behaviour can cause a sudden sunburst of happiness.

And the political capability of celebrities has not yet been fully tapped. Surely the Ground Force team could break down hostility to gypsy sites by adding some decking and a few tasteful planters. And I’m sure Time Team would have uncovered all the weapons of mass destruction.

But there is one show that doubtless some production company will be pitching right now: How Clean is Your Hospital?, in which Kim and Aggie persuade low-paid contract cleaners and overstretched nurses to work even harder to root out the MRSA superbug. Who else could hector, gross-out and shame, yet receive back only apologetic goodwill?

When celebrities have so much political clout, politicians are left trying to become “celebrities”, in that shallow Heat magazine sense of inviting us to care what they wear at weekends, how Tony is woken at 6am by little Leo, how adorably batty Sandra Howard is with her knackered old car. But politicians are too laden with our cynicism, they talk of long-term economic strategies, suggest that we make tricky choices — between, say, better school meals or more police — thus making everything tiresomely slow and complicated, when we want it now but don’t want to pay.

Worst of all, politicians are achingly yawnsome and uncool. This month’s Glamour magazine features interviews with all three party leaders yet they are such reader-repellents that — unlike Gwen Stefani, Joss Stone and even D-list Rachel Stevens — not even the Prime Minister receives the smallest name-check on the cover.

As celebrities start to invade the political process, either politicians will have to use the strategies of reality TV both to show their humanity and to drive their agenda. Or celebrities are going to start standing for political office: suddenly President Reagan and Arnie “The Governator” Schwarzenegger don’t seem so risible. Because while Tony Blair and Michael Howard grub around for women’s votes, Jamie Oliver already has our hearts.

Family values

Michael Howard in Glamour on why he rarely talks about his children in interviews. “I have a stepson in his forties, and a son and daughter in their twenties. I don’t make much of an issue about them for the simple reason that they are entitled to more privacy than me.” Well, until a few weeks after the interview when he decided to drag his entire clan, including his 4-year-old grandaughter, Tallulah, on to the conference stage thus giving the media carte blanche to scrutinise his loved ones under the umbrella of “public interest”.



Twisted ideas

What an uncivilised and barbaric society Iran must be, judging from the public execution of the child killer Mohammad Bijeh, covered extensively in every newspaper yesterday. The Daily Mail devoted a particularly lavish picture spread to a step-by-step guide to his violent death: how he was flogged, stabbed by one of his victim’s relatives, then, to shouts of “make him twist”, hanged from a crane. Yes, how medieval is the society which commits these vengeful public acts, but how much better is the one which prints these snuff-shots in its newspapers?

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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