LONDON: If only the politicians would tell us what they really think, we say. If only they’d drop the soundbites and the focus-group-tested messaging and give it to us straight. Two politicians did just that this week. They granted us an unimpeded look into their true souls — and it wasn’t pretty.

UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was not one of them. His apology over his broken tuition fee promise was meant to look candid and genuine, but it was as much a made-for-video stunt as his original pledge — and, as one observer rightly noted, took the curious form of a husband saying “sorry for my affair; next time I won’t vow to be faithful”.

The act of unbridled honesty was committed instead by the chief whip Andrew Mitchell who, living up to his “Thrasher” nickname, gave a tongue-lashing to the police guarding Downing Street. Whether he called them “f***ing plebs” who ought to “learn your f***ing place”, as the Sun had it, we may never know. But that Mitchell insulted men ready to risk their lives to protect him and his colleagues was confirmed when the chief whip telephoned the officer concerned to apologise.

The damage will linger, suggesting this is what the government’s most senior enforcer — a millionaire said to live as expensively as he was educated — really thinks: that the police are glorified servants who, if regrettably exempt these days from the obligation to bow and touch the forelock, ought at least to do what they’re told by their betters. It is an ugly impression, one fast congealing in the public imagination as the defining feature of this government’s top echelon: that they are a rich, over-privileged clique, out of touch with everyday life and with a nasty streak they cannot conceal.

Luckily for David Cameron, Mitchell has next to no public profile and is in a job that requires even less. Unless more police officers demand his head, he can be quietly disappeared. In the US, the Republican party’s problem is somewhat graver. The man whose true self was exposed this week is their nominee for president, Mitt Romney.

It bears repeating that, as former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan puts it, this was meant to be the year “the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose”. Barack Obama has disappointed, his poll rating usually below 50 per cent with unemployment stubbornly above 8 per cent. A halfway decent, generic Republican should win this comfortably. The election is Romney’s to lose — and he is doing his best to make that happen.

The killer blow may well prove to be the secret video of his appearance before a closed-door, $50,000-a-plate dinner for donors recorded in May but which surfaced this week. Much has been made of Romney’s casual writing off of 47 per cent of the American population as parasites who pay no income tax, see themselves as “victims”, and believe the government owes them a living — to paraphrase only slightly — who will never vote for him anyway. As strategies for winning votes go, condemning half the electorate — including the millions of pensioners and veterans who receive benefits — is certainly novel.

But while these specifics are gobsmacking, it’s the overall tone of Romney unplugged that is so striking. Read the full transcript and you realise that you are eavesdropping on a meeting of the 1 per cent, a conclave of the cosseted super-rich of which Romney is so clearly a part.

By arrangement with the Guardian