Gordon the Grouch

Are we really supposed to care that Gordon Brown is a bit of bad-tempered grouch? Within the limited remit of personality politics, the standard has become Tony Blair, a relatively personality-free smarm-machine, who avoids making gaffes by being over-produced and over-spun.

Yet these terms of reference seem to me to have sod all to do with what real people actually want from other human beings, let alone politicians. For me, his bland, PR-man image, was probably his least publicly attractive quality, not his best. The expectation that politicians have flawless personalities is something that probably exists only in the minds of Fleet Street hacks.