Martin Rowson – As I please

SAY what you like about the Nazis, the American journalist PJ O’Rourke once wrote, but none of them ever had sexual fantasies about being tied to a bed and whipped by someone dressed up as a social democrat. I remembered this gag after the conclusion of the Max Mosley trial, but in the way you do, I let it go for a stroll through my imagination and, sure enough, I was soon relating it to Gordon Brown. Not that he’s a Nazi (although these days he’s hardly a social democrat either). Nor, I suspect, has he been absent from a fair few sexual fantasies. In the glory days of his “Iron Chancellorship” and during her own 15 minutes of fame, Ulrika Jonsson interviewed him for the telly and hardly seemed able to contain her lust.

Likewise – and more notoriously – in the late 1990s, a gay writer on The Independent extolled Brown’s brooding allure and concluded his article by observing that he could never think about Gordon Brown without the phrase “Brace yourself, bitch” immediately coming to mind.

I should imagine that right now, although thoughts of Gordon may make many members of the Labour Party wake up sweating in the middle of the night, this hardly ever has a sexual dimension. But that’s just another of his problems.

Even though practising politicians are usually the last people to recognise it, the rest of us know – inarticulately but quite clearly – that politics is and always has been about a great deal more than just politics. So boredom, irritation, disgust and either fancying or being physically repelled by the Prime Minister are equally potent aspects of the political process as policy, principles and the rest of the familiar wonkery.  Indeed, all the sordid paraphernalia of spin and focus groups is really all about the political class merely trying to catch up with what it thinks the public actually wants, which is why nonsense like that is invariably so cheesy. Gordon Brown claiming to groove to the Arctic Monkeys or David Cameron pogoing to The Jam’s “Eton Rifles” is just another variation of the crippling embarrassment of watching your local vicar dancing at the youth club disco.

Nonetheless, you factor out the apparently trivial at your peril. Although everyone (we imagine) believes in the Bennite prescription that politics should be about “ishoos” and not personalities, that kind of politics is barely human. That’s why I’m going to demand that you take my increasing irritation with Brown seriously as a political stance. It’s not the policies, which are irritating enough, but the man. More precisely, every time he opens his mouth, I feel like screaming and throwing things across the room.

This is because of the breathtaking vapidity of his rhetoric, which is now so at odds with observable reality that it implies everything he says is literally meaningless. Take his comments last week about the fractious bishops of the Anglican Communion taking a break from tearing each other to shreds over sexuality to “march” through central London to “end poverty”. According to Brown, this stroll through the sunshine by some elderly men in purple dresses was “the greatest act of faith this city has ever seen”. Really? Does our Prime Minister truly believe it trumps the Protestant martyrs burnt at Smithfield by Bloody Mary, or the Carmelite monks boiled alive by Henry VIII at Blackfriars 20 years earlier?

I know this is a trivial example. I know he was probably just trying to be polite. But bullshit like this, along with his infuriatingly vacuous mantra of “getting on with the job”, serve to compound the impression that Brown is equally cavalier and complacent about everything else as well.

If we lived in an ideal world, this shouldn’t matter. But we don’t – and neither does Brown. What we do live under is a kind of democratic autocracy, the atrophied end result of an electoral system which, over the past 30 years, has resulted in governments with huge majorities based on the votes of a minority of the electorate. Worse, once in power, it now takes a decade or more for the will of the people to be truly reflected in order to get rid of a government – be it Labour or Tory. This is profoundly corrupting, because it lumbers us with stale administrations, bereft of ideas. But it also builds up a poisonous store of frustration in the electorate, where seemingly trivial things such as boredom and irritation finally boil over into rage. This is what happened in 1997 to the Tories and now it looks like happening to Labour, too.

Because we have a rotten electoral system (as in rotten boroughs), our politics is now almost entirely negative. Brown’s brief summer of popularity last year was solely because he wasn’t Blair; Blair’s longer good fortune was because he was not John Major; Major’s was down to him not being Thatcher. In other words, we don’t now vote for delivery, but for deliverance. And it looks likely that a great many people will now vote for absolutely anyone who will deliver them from Gordon Brown.