CITIZEN CAMERON 109
have a share of the celebrity’s “charismatic authority”.3 Theorists of ‘stardom’ and
‘celebrity’ culture have long distinguished between these categories as they exist in
private and public domains. If stardom is comprised of what the person is in their
space of performance, then celebrity is what the star is in his private life. Celebrity
life is an image, a representation of how a star lives in real life which like all public
discourses is subject to scrutiny, sanction and moral judgment. Hence stars have “an
existence in the world independent of their screen/fiction appearance” (Dryer 1979:
22) where there prevails a “duality between actor and character” (Allen and Gomery
1985: 172). However, the real lives of stars are always pieced together from gossip
columns and paparazzi scoops primarily because this is where the element of
celebrity in stardom is revealed. The audience, therefore, consumes not only
performances but also ‘real’ lives of stars off stage – a kind of publication (distorted
at times, and partly with consent) of their private lives. Regarding movie stars and
cultural icons, Geraghty (2000: 189) says that “it is the audience’s access to and
celebration of intimate information from a variety of texts and sources which are
important”. It is not easy to transpose the categories of political stardom and cultural
stardom on a general basis, though the rudimentary element of lifestyle is integral to
stardom as a general phenomenon. Lifestyle plays an even more significant role in the
sustenance of the public image of a political luminary, coming under a much more
rigorous scrutiny than their movie star counterparts. Even more so in case of David
Cameron, the premier political representative of a country.
Many people were scandalised when self-professed ‘body-positive’ Miley Cyrus, a
former child star, performed a hip-thrusting ‘twerking’ act live at the MTV Video
Media Awards in 2013. The collective consciousness is quick to take affront and fuel
social media outrage where there are those who disapprove and those who try and
formulate a rationale of approval. The vivid picture that Ashcroft paints of David
Cameron, while it generated reactions of disbelief, generated something else as a
direct result of the type of disclosure discussed in the earlier sections of the essay.
Weber (2004: 48) writes about charisma – “[a] certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue
of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or
at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary
person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary”.
3