IN years to come, politicians would be cautioned by their aides and press officers about the perils of the photo-op, and the risk of a stray picture turning them into a figure of fun.
In February 1967 a staff photographer from the Glasgow Herald took this photograph of Quintin Hogg, then the Conservatives’ shadow Home Secretary, with what appears to be an outsize pair of bunny ears.
It ran on the front page, too.
While on a visit to Glasgow Hogg called in at a house in Cathcart, and found himself blowing up the balloons for a children’s party.
Shortly afterwards, Hogg attended a different kind of party - a Tory party rally in the city.
He attacked Harold Wilson’s Labour because, he said, it “worshipped at the shrine of egalitarianism, in the sense of equality of reward - the true source of the brain-drain across the Atlantic” and because of its “economic and political incompetence, because of its reckless expenditure, because of its cruel taxation and idiotic taxes.” While Labour “prates of social justice, it is creating a society which is not just.”
He urged voters to let his own party lead the country on a crusade to a “new pursuit of excellence” in everything from law and order to education, freedom, and health.
Hogg would have to wait another three long years for Wilson to be beaten at the polls, by Ted Heath.
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