This is going to hurt.

With politics, as with relationships, there are certain times when you wish they'd just lie to you a little harder.

This week, for instance, with the election months away and the Tory campaign bursting onto billboards across the country in all its terrible definitely-unairbrushed glory, it'd be nice if someone in government was making some sort of noise to persuade the people of Britain that they really do have a choice in their political leadership. Amidst all the filibustering, the clumsy cloak-and-dagger backstairs plotting over a last-minute replacement for Gordon Brown, if it's too much to ask that we actually be granted a degree of democratic self-determination, then I'd like them to pretend. I'd like them to at least pretend they have anything other than contempt for ordinary voters. Unfortunately, this week's abortive coup against Gordon Brown's leadership of the Labour Party demonstrates that contempt perfectly.

It is impossible to truly know what Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon thought to accomplish with their secret ballot. Perhaps they genuinely wished to give the people of Britain the leader they deserved, the leader we have waited for for so long: someone worthy of the respect of his or her country and executive, someone who has earned the confidence of the people and the party, someone who would not, for example, demonstrate their utter scorn for the electorate and for parliament in a cheesy daytime television interview.

But whatever their intentions, they demonstrated, as so many sitting members of both the Labour and Conservative parties have in the past, the sincere conviction that it is the job of parliament to decide who should lead the people, rather than it being the right of the people to decide who should run the government.

David Cameron's new poster campaign is disgusting and fascinating, like a teenager's sock drawer, or tertiary syphilis. Once you manage to tear your eyes from the spooky, ten-foot-high head-and-shoulder-shot of the Tory hopeful that dominates the frame, an image that absolutely hasn't had its jawline articifially strengthened, its pores smoothed, its nose diminished, its hair filled in or its skintone adjusted to remove that pesky Eton flush that was so in evidence at the 2009 party conference, you start to notice the little things. Like the fact that the words 'Conservative Party' are not prominently featured anywhere in the design. Like the fact that, despite their utter ideological disinclination to factor the lives of ordinary people into their policymaking, the Tories have recognised that the people of Britain want to elect a leader, not a party.

The Tories understand that whilst the brand of their party remains tarnished, their prospective candidate for leadership is by far the strongest part of their case to make the next government - not because of who he is, but because of what he represents. He represents someone who wants the trust and respect of the people, and is prepared to put his touched-up face on a giant poster saying so.

Every opponent of the 'presidential' attitude adopted by Blair and now aped by Cameron bases their arguments on the fact that, technically speaking, no British leader has ever been elected by the British people: it's understood that the leader of the political party which gains the most votes will be invited to form a government by the queen. Unfortunately, apologism for our anti-republican state mechanisms doesn't quite cut it anymore in terms of the popular mood.

As Paul Sagar observed at Bad Conscience this week, what the British people appear to want is not just a change of leader, but a change in the type of political leadership Britain has become used to: "not any-old-leader emerging through ...back-stabbing, pole-climbing patronage structures, but a man (or perhaps woman) with charisma in whom they can believe and who is tested through the conflict of a national plebiscite."

Put simply, Shiny Dave has had himself definitely-not-airbrushed all to fuck, but at least he seems to care.

This is why we're going to start to see more dangerous smiling bastards like Boris Johnson and David Cameron getting elected to high office. In a climate in which the machinations of politics are so thoroughly debased, in a country in which the mechanisms of government are occluded and arcane, in a culture where we are no longer invested in the narrowing ideological difference between two ancient, stale political parties, charisma can count for a great deal. Charisma can replace concrete policies. Charisma can look very much like the change we so desperately need.

David Cameron is not the change that his poster promises. David Cameron is a smiling bastard in a nice shirt, which is why I will be voting against him and campaigning against his leadership bid over the coming months. But until the Labour party sit up and notice which way the political wind is blowing, until they stop filibustering and start to show the electorate something other than utter contempt, until they put strategies on the table that engage the public in at least the illusion of choice, we can point out the pixel-smears on Cameron's jawline as much as we like: the bastards are still going to win hearts and minds.