CONFRONTED by Tony Blair's stratospheric 67 per cent approval rating that contrasts with the record low personal rating that he has achieved as Conservative leader, William Hague has got himself a new spin doctor with a plan to convince us he's a regular guy.

She is Amanda Platell, ex-editor of a Sunday newspaper that, like the Tory Party, is a shadow of its former self.

A woman whose strange feeling of the voters' pulse deems that Mr Hague's fortunes would benefit from him wearing an open-necked shirt to show he comes from a working-class background and went to a comprehensive school.

There are, of course, millions of regular guys with the very same credentials - and one supposes that Miss Platell's ploy is for him to come across favourably with them.

But, how many, I wonder, were as "ordinary" as Mr Hague as a teenage schoolboy, who, unlike those who grew up to become regular guys, had Margaret Thatcher, not pop stars or footballers, as a pin-up.

And who was so bent on a career in politics that he made his debut as a delegate at the age of 16 at the Tory conference and, when he reached the stage on the flow chart of his ambitions of becoming an MP, vowed he would not marry until he was a goverment minister? Ordinary guy? Bumptious, power-seeking squirt, more like.

And no amount of spin-doctored gimmicks, such as visiting theme parks wearing a baseball cap or dispensing with ties, will dispel that image or make William a man of the people, rather than the pushy young wierdo he is.

A Tory disaster in the forthcoming Scottish, Welsh, European and local government elections - on the scale suggested by his and the party's opinion-poll ratings which have Labour's lead of 54 per cent double that of the Tories - suggests that both Mr Hague and Miss Platell may soon need fresh career advice.

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