The Stage-Management of the leaders’ personal lives in the 2015 General Election

This article focuses on a specific aspect of the leaders of the four main British parties’ image-building strategies in the 2015 campaign—the stage-management of their private lives. Indeed, family life is used as a key instrument in the construction of a particular dimension of the leaders’ public personality theorised by Ana Inés Langer as the “private persona.” Based primarily on a televised corpus, it seeks to analyse the political messages that were conveyed through public fatherhood. In addition, attention is devoted to the involvement of the leaders’ wives