A new Labour grandee remarked to me at the BBC’s election night party that everyone knows that Tony gets tired. Everyone knows that he needs eight hours’ sleep. This is very worrying. We all know what happened to poor Charles Kennedy when he didn’t get enough sleep; he forgot his economic policy.

So I am particularly perturbed by Blair’s revelations in The Sun last Wednesday about his nocturnal habits. He claimed, cuddling his unusual wife under some romantic pink cherry blossom, and discussing their passionate intimacy with some journalists and a photographer, that he is a five-times-a-night man.

“At least,” he said, having affectionately warned his wife to keep her hands to herself. “I can do it more, depending how I feel.” This was corroborated by Cherie Blair; when he was asked whether he was up to it, she said firmly, “He always is.”

Five times a night! Are you thinking what I’m thinking? It’s hardly surprising that our prime minister feels tired all the time and needs his eight hours’ “sleep” if he’s going at it all night like a jack rabbit and has been in the grip of this habit for fully quarter of a century.

What right has he to wear himself out in this statistically most surprising way when he has a country to run, Africa to rescue and democracy to bring to the world? Sleep walking is no way to achieve all that. If you ask me, he is putting his sex life before his duty to the planet. Perhaps he is not to blame: he may be a sex addict. He may need help.

Still, what an unexpected joy it was to read all about it. Now there’s a new new Labour nickname to match “Two Jags”, which bedevils John Prescott. It’s Tony “Five Times” Blair. What a pleasure it will be to hound him with it. We must take pleasure where we can in these dismal times.

It is positively thrillingly absurd that in a supposedly civilised country, a supposedly highly educated, supposedly deeply pious prime minister’s wife, who is also a judge and a mother of young children, should in public, in an orchestrated interview, make an unmistakably sexual and giggling suggestion that “size matters”.

But titter ye not, as the great Frankie Howerd might have said. It’s not really funny that we have a prime minister of such astonishing, wince-making vulgarity with a wife who is, if anything, worse. The People’s Premier has always been a reliable cultural weather vane, a sign of the times.

Commentators have been warning for years of the decline of modesty and manners. But even the most outraged of Jeremiahs could never have dreamt of hearing this willing violation of one’s own intimacy, this prostitution of private sexual love for public relations, this Big Brother confessional, boastful, hyper-sexualised slaggy prolespeak in the garden of No 10 on the lips of the prime minister and his wife, the day before a general election.

What a glaring contrast he makes with the man who might just conceivably have been prime minister. Michael Howard is, I am quite certain, absolutely incapable of talking like that in public and so is his wife although they, too, have had a long and happy marriage which they might have exploited like the Blairs. He is just too decent, too discreet and too civilised.

So it seems particularly unfair to feel, as I do, that Howard really should go. He may not be a better politician than Blair, possibly because he is much more honest, but he is a much better, much cleverer man. Still, I think it is a good thing for his party that he has honourably said he will stand down soon. He might have been tempted by his modest successes to stay and fight the next election. But the sad truth is that politically he is a loser; I even half suspect that with the same campaign but a different leader the Conservatives might have done even better.

I like and admire Howard and I don’t think his campaign was particularly opportunistic, although of course opportunism is necessarily part of politics. Personally I very much regret the party’s failure to put forward radical, principled proposals for reforming the public services. But I don’t think the emphasis on immigration was opportunistic, although I think that attacking Blair for lying was something that Howard should have left to the journalists, who were doing it quite enthusiastically anyway.

The real trouble with Howard is that he seems to come across all wrong personally. That ought not to matter. In Britain’s fairly recent political past, in a less sophisticated, yet actually more sophisticated time, the general impression of a politician simply didn’t matter so much — politics had not yet become mass entertainment and low level TV reality show. Boring men in suits could get elected without being any better or worse than politicians today.

Now, as has been true in America for many decades, a leader cannot succeed without powerful touchy-feely charisma, generous amounts of the common touch and preferably a lot of hair.

Howard seems to lack all that. Again and again throughout the election, people kept telling me how ghastly he seemed — how smug, how complacent, how cynical. Again and again I protested that I didn’t believe he is any of those things — rather the opposite.

But finally I began to see that he does look too much like a slick lawyer; he does have a strange smile playing on his face which could seem superior or dishonest; he can’t or won’t change his accent to suit his audience, as Blair does; he doesn’t quite know how to hit the right note with people who aren’t listening carefully, but simply responding emotionally; he’s not good with the uneducated, because he comes across as too clever and over-articulate.

The electorate of today demands a certain kind of leadership package in which the leader’s real qualities (good and bad) are disguised by the populist wrapping. It is deeply depressing. It’s even more depressing, on the principle that a country gets the leader it deserves, that our leader is once again Mr Five Times.