The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Mock the Week is maturing into an excellent satire show. If satire is returning,  a Conservative government must be imminent. During Conservative governments we get such wonders as Spitting Image and Not the Nine o’clock News. During Labour – as the luvvies refuse to attack "their boys" – we get The Goodies and Little Britain – inane, moronic slapstick with zero political content.

My favourite recent moment was the good value Frankie Boyle’s comment on Gordon Brown’s appointment of a personal trainer. In his view the truth of the story was that a woman was leading the Prime Minister off into the woods, not for exercise, but so that he could "sit down on a tree stump and cry."

This made me think. What exactly is wrong with Gordon Brown? While Sarkozy, Bush and even David Cameron have been speaking out – and in Sarkozy’s case, taking action – on the crisis in Georgia, Brown has been strangely silent. Our economy is visibly on the slide, with the ex-Chancellor’s "stealth tax and spend" policies being blamed. Yet he has nothing to say in his own defence. While other world leaders chatted amiably with each other at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, the allegedly sport-loving Mr Brown preferred seclusion. Was he by any chance in his bed with the sheets pulled over his head?

Our Prime Minister is famously prone to mobile-phone-smashing tantrums and his entourage are said to tiptoe around him for fear of incurring his wrath. Does this sound like a man in command of himself, let alone the political situation?

The theory could also explain why the Labour Party seems unable to deal with him. Perhaps their reluctance to give the quietus to his near-dead career is explained by fear of the political damage involved in revealing his mental state? Perhaps they feel it’s better discreetly to control the situation medically, rather than admit what they have inflicted on us?

Before our Labour-supporting friends explode, let me admit readily that this is the merest speculation and that I have no concrete evidence. I am asking a question, not making an accusation. Indeed, as a long-time supporter of mental health charities, this would be one of the few things that could actually make me feel compassion for the odious Fifer. Since first the thought occurred to me however, I cannot help notice how it explains the PM’s behaviour far better than any political logic.