Voters ‘see David Cameron as Dick Dastardly type’

DAVID Cameron confessed he would have liked to have been Peter Perfect from the 1960s cartoon Wacky Races after a focus group of voters decided he was more like the villain Dick Dastardly.

Dick Dastardly and Muttley in a scene from Wacky Races.

The revelation comes in an ITV Tonight programme to be aired tonight in which the Prime Minister is told he reminded voters of the moustache twirling cartoon character.

In comments which may not go down well with wife Samantha, he told presenter Tom Bradby: “I used to watch that when I was little … I wanted to be the good-looking one with the beautiful girl, but, anyway, it didn’t work out that way.”

Mrs Cameron spoke out over the weekend about how she and her husband had come “close to breaking point” as they coped with looking after their disabled son Ivan.

The Prime Minister told Tonight that it might have been better if he had taken more “time out” after Ivan’s death aged six in February 2009 – at a time when Mr Cameron was opposition leader, preparing to take on Gordon Brown in the battle for Downing Street.

“It’s everyone’s dread to lose a child, that you out-live your children,” said Mr Cameron.

“You lose someone you love so much, so young. It does hit you like nothing else and there is a bit of you that thinks, well, if you can face that sort of challenge in your life, then it puts everything else into perspective.

“When it happened we did have to take some time out, maybe we should have taken some more time out, on reflection. It was just a really difficult time and it takes a very long time before you get over it.

“Well, you never truly get over it, but what happens is that, slowly you start remembering all the positive things and you start thinking about those things, rather than just the gloom and doom and the missing and the pain.”

Mrs Cameron said their children Nancy, Elwen and Florence “cope really well” with life at Downing Street and “do a pretty good job” of stopping their father let his job go to his head, by “taking the mick all day long”.

“When we moved here it was incredibly daunting,” said Mrs Cameron. “I was terrified of the impact it was going to have on the children, on us as a family, on our marriage.

“But it’s been much easier than I expected it to be. I go to the same office, the children go to the same school. There’s a lot of our life that hasn’t changed.”

Tonight’s Spotlight on David Cameron will be broadcast on ITV1 at 7:30pm.

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