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Barack Obama, celebrity, Clint Eastwood, Conservative, convention, David Cameron, David Letterman, Dirty Harry, endorsement, Magna Carta, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, National Health Service, NHS, people, political, politics, privatisation, Republican, sell-off, support, Tories, Tory, Vox Political

Clint Eastwood and the chair that stood in for Barack Obama at the Repubican Convention. The speech disturbed many Eastwood fans – myself included – but he has won back his doubters with charming simplicity. (Photo: STAN HONDA/AFP/GettyImages)
Clint Eastwood. What a guy.
You may recall a while ago I was one of the many who took issue with Mr Eastwood for his bizarre interview with a chair during a Republican convention in the United States. I wrote an article asking why celebrities have to belittle themselves by declaring their support for political parties, and basically said that it can’t do their reputation any good at all.
Well, it seems I misjudged the great man.
Collared by an interviewer who demanded to know what possessed him, Eastwood’s response was the stuff of legends. “If they’re stupid enough to ask me to a political convention,” he said, “they have to take whatever they get.”
Genius.
One person for whom I doubt this response would work is David Cameron, who was outed as a dunce on David Letterman’s US chat show last week.
It isn’t stupid to ask what “Magna Carta” means. After all, my next-door-neighbour’s four-year-old can work it out.
Perhaps Letterman could have started him off with something easier, though – like maybe, when his party didn’t win the election and never stated that it planned to do so, why has he sold off so much of the NHS in England to private companies, and why does he have plans to sell off so much more of it?
The old argument that it creates more choice is clearly nonsense because people were, reasonably, expecting the choice to be theirs. Instead, they have been presented with the company that has bought the contract and told, “This is your choice of NHS supplier. Don’t catch anything too serious or you’ll be paying it off for the rest of your life.”
Or, in the words of an iconic Eastwood character: “Do you feel lucky?”