SERIOUS, SLICK...STANDING FOR PRESIDENT?

He's the Democratic politician with movie-star looks, dogged by accusations of being a smooth-talking elitist. But Gavin Newsom may just win the most powerful office in the world Interview by Jonathan Freedland

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WHEN YOU THINK of the politician Donald Trump isn't, when you think of the norm he broke, the archetype he shattered, you might well picture a man who looks a lot like Gavin Newsom. Tall and handsome, hair coiffed just so, with a blond wife and four photogenic kids at his side, Newsom, who has been the governor of California since 2019 and is often described as the frontrunner to be the Democratic nominee for the White House in 2028, looks the way professional politicians, and especially presidential candidates, look in the movies.

It's dogged Newsom for years, that look of his, perennially suggesting that he is, in the words of one California newspaper, "too ambitious, too slickly handsome, and too patrician-seeming", especially for a populist age that cherishes the authentic and has no truck with anything either phoney or "elite". The elite tag especially has hung around Newsom's neck for decades, thanks to the fact that his ascent to the top of California politics has seemed smooth and unbroken, apparently eased by a childhood spent in the orbit of the Getty family, when that name was a byword for astronomical wealth.

Now Newsom is bent on busting those myths, laying out in a new memoir a reality that confounds the public image. Sceptics will of course assume that this is just another classic politician move: the book that precedes a campaign for national office. Even so, few readers of Young Man in a Hurry will come away thinking of its author as the "Prince Gavin" of his rivals' caricature. Instead they will see a man, now 58, whose story is far more complex, and interesting, than the haircut and smile would have you believe - one whose life might just have equipped him to win the most powerful office in the world.