Edward Pearce

The enemies of Gordon Brown are a wonderful company as, God knows, were the enemies of John Major. A government suffers bad shocks, its leader stumbles and attracts a bad press. What government and prime minister do next, over time and rather successfully, may well redeem them with mere voters. But party members in internal opposition at Westminster will have none of it. What follows is suicide bombing – of a genteel and wittering sort.

It is all rather much. The press - from Alpha Argus to Epsilon Echo, Guardian to Sport - has engaged all these months in the hurly-burly of backbench peculation only to be rewarded with the deep, deep peace of John Terry’s adultery. Flipped second house succeeds pornographic video, succeeds duck house, all finally garlanded by the invocation of parliamentary privilege. 'Too much' hardly says it. Headline-subs have lived like the bees in Keats’s autumn ‘until they think warm days will never cease’. SHAME, SHAMED, SHAME! the 80 point proclaims. BBC icons turn to the camera with a touch of the Fouquier-Tinvilles. Now, thanks to a Chelsea midfielder or ‘love rat’ doing the usual with a friend’s wife – correction, colleague’s ex-girlfriend – narrow pre-occupation is met by best business practice: diversification.

Politicians have not stopped being pompous, but these days they are pompous in a faux-bonhomous, sub-Australian way. The minister is now by inflation called the ‘secretary of state’, but on The World at One or PM, he will address Ms Kearney or Mr Mair as 'Martha' or 'Eddie' through every wiggle of the party line, much as a master or mistress would once have spoken to an indoor servant. As for themselves, they want us to call them by first names instanter, but not 'Kenneth' or 'Anthony’. Along with the Greengrocer's Apostrophe, we must now live with the Politician's Diminutive: he is, and must be, 'Ken' or 'Tony’ (or Geoff, or Ed, or Andy...). This chummery affects the best of them. Some glinting PR type has told the useful and rather reputable Mr Cable that 'Vincent' is too formal. So, to the City and the world, he must now be 'Vince’.

When I used to cover Liberal Democrat party conferences, the late-night curious journalist could wander the hotel in Harrogate or Torquay, push against a glass door and, at 1.30 in the morning, find a dozen of the delegates in workshop mode, discussing the minutiae of land valuation tax or the single transferable vote. The spirit of earnest still flourishes among them. Their assault on compulsory ID cards and biometric passports lifts the heart. What makes it twitch is Nick Clegg’s invitation to the People to tell the Ministry what reforms it wants. We are getting far too much of ‘the People’ at present.

A conversation overheard at a meeting of the Parliamentary Double Standards Committee: Newspaper owners of all colours are worried about David Laws. He has had to resign for something about which we really ought to have been more understanding. He took money he wasn't entitled to and didn't declare it. It’s against the new Commons rules and is often called fraudulent conversion. End of argument.