Home Secretary John Reid took time out of his busy schedule to make the most of the parliamentary recess and indulge in his favourite pastime. ‘I know it looks a bit strange to folk who know nothing about it,’ said the Home Secretary, ‘but clowning helps me unwind after a hard day.’ Making an allusion to the holiday plans of his colleague, the Foreign Secretary, Dr. Reid added: ‘And I know one thing for sure… I don’t look half as silly as somebody I know touring around Cornwall in caravan.’

Dr. Reid’s affinity with the circus began at an early age after running away with Billy Smart’s Circus when he was only eight years old. He might have become a professional performer, only chose to pursue a career in politics when he was diagnosed with an allergy to custard. ‘It was heartbreaking. I could have been the next Coco the Clown. It really was my life up to the age of nineteen. In those days, the circus was a hotbed of socialist thinking,’ he said. ‘We would gather around the elephants at night and read from the Communist Manifesto. To us carny folk, socialism was an extension of what we already knew: communal living, shared profits, and free performing budgerigars for all.’

After such a childhood, it was perhaps unsurprising that Dr. Reid went on to university where his interest found its way into his studies. He holds a PhD in the history of circus from the University of Stirling and his thesis was titled, ‘From Marxism to Buckets of Paper: a study of the influence of the circus on early communist thinkers’. He admits that he now looks back on those days with a certain nostalgia. ‘Unlike pre-revolutionary clowns like the famous Bim Bom, Soviet clowning was of a different class. Oleg Popov was an early influence,’ Dr. Reid explained. ‘And it is a little known fact that Stalin had his own private circus in the grounds of the Kremlin, and that much of the Soviet foreign policy was directed by a clown call Mishka.’ Asked if he thought that the Soviet model had any bearing in modern politics, Dr. Reid smiled sadly. ‘Unfortunately not,’ he said. ‘There are no clowns within New Labour.’

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