Poor Gordon Brown. Poor, poor Gordon Brown. During Tony Blair's ten years as Prime Minister, Gordon had the perpetual, twitching impatience of someone watching someone else struggling to take the lid off a jar of olives. Someone dying to shout: “Let me do it! I know how - with a damp tea-towel!”

Since taking over, however - with a palpable flourish of “Now let's get a real prime minister on the case” - Gordon looks like a man who very rapidly realised that the lid really was quite tightly sealed, after all. Within a year of getting the job, he appears to have lost the local elections, alienated most of his party and taken the country into recession. It is, by any definition, an EPIC FAIL, as young people say.

Of course, things are being done, even as we speak, to counteract Gordon's recent run of EPIC FAIL. There was a bracing “chat” about the economy: “I can get us through this.” Doubtless Nelson Mandela will be hugged quite soon. Most intriguing of all, however, was a report in last week's papers that at a meeting Hazel Blears apparently raised the idea of Gordon starring in a political version of The Apprentice. Well, here's something I never thought I'd write, but: Hazel Blears is a genius. A. Genius. She's bang on trend. In the 21st century, we demand prime ministers who are a cross between a neighbour with a good knowledge of wine and someone who has a Sony-nominated show on Radio 2. Who knows what we will want when the recession kicks in? I suspect that it might be a prime minister who drives around the country on a flatbed truck, hurling fistfuls of fivers into the crowd, screaming: “There's plenty more where that came from!” But still, for now, we want a leader who's a bit, well, telly. Given this, then, for Gordon Brown to star in a Westminster version of The Apprentice - perhaps we could call it The Big Ben-tice. Or The No 10-tice - would be a move of political dynamite.

For starters, it'll get him on the covers of Radio Times, Heat and We Love Telly! magazines - key media outlets that Gordon needs to access if he is to address the 20 million apolitical, listless, inexplicably selfsatisfied (“Whoever you vote for, the Government gets in!”) non-voters in this country, on whom our intermingled destinies unhappily rest. It'll get him out of Parliament for a bit, too - which will surely be a relief to everyone working with him. I can't imagine that he often kicks back with a packet of Boasters and some chitty-chat about Doctor Who. I can imagine that a great many apparatchiks will be squeezing their stress-relieving balls a great deal less should Gordon spend one day a week in a recording studio.

From the point of view of the Labour Party, however, the single greatest advantage is that, should Brown helm the show, the entire country will immediately become complicit in maintaining a grand illusion: that Gordon Brown is the simply greatest statesman this country has ever seen.

That is, after all, the equivalent of what happens with Sir Alan Sugar on The Apprentice. Each show starts with portentous shots of Sir Alan hovering over the City of London in his helicopter, as The Dance of the Knights from Romeo and Juliet saws away, viscerally, on the soundtrack.

“Sir Alan Sugar controls a business empire worth £800 million,” the voiceover intones, solemnly, as Sir Alan rustles through a briefcase full of papers. It makes someone on their way to a business meeting about some answerphones look like Bruce Willis flying off to martyr himself on an asteroid in Armageddon. The truth doesn't matter. It is a nugatory concern that Sir Alan looks like the small, priapic bear from Bo' Selecta. It is but a trifle that, in the event of Sugar turning the show down, the BBC was so far down its list that the voiceover would have gone “Sir Clive Sinclair controls a business empire worth £400” instead.

Because television needs to deal in absolutes, every decision that Sir Alan makes has to be correct and every opinion he utters has to be true. Otherwise, the whole show just turns into some old buffer in a pretend boardroom essentially dicking some eager young trainees around for six months.

Imagine, then, a version of The Apprentice set in Westminster. Just as Sir Alan is “Suralan”, Gordon Brown would become “Primester” - an undeniably razzier moniker than his current one, “King Loser of Loserville”. Instead of Suralan's sidekicks - the tombstone-faced Nick Hewer, the no-nonsense Margaret Mountford - the Primester will have to find two right-hand factotums of his own. Tony Benn would make a fabulous Nick, I think. However, while Hazel Blears clearly suggested the idea so that she could be the Primester's Margaret Mountford, it would undeniably more fun if, as a special surprise for Gordon, they got in Cherie Blair, QC, instead. She will, after all, probably be looking for a new job by then.

During Gordon's past few months of misery and failure it has been hard to remember that, just a few short years ago, many women had a Heathcliff-esque crush on him. They dreamt of making that rogue lock of hair hang across his sweating forehead as he became their Chancellor of the Sexchequer. Should Gordon get the Apprentice gig, however - spending ten weeks of prime-time slamming his fist on a boardroom table and shouting “The people of Britain DEMAND a better consultancy paper on parking restrictions outside primary schools!” at 16 terrified-looking yet weaselly local councillors - we'd all soon be back onside. Finish the whole thing off with him getting on to government jets accompanied by some classical music - or maybe even the soundtrack to Rocky - and David Cameron would be dead in the water. But you know - you just know - that at that meeting last week, when Hazel Blears suggested all this, they laughed at her. The FOOLS.

Who ever heard of a luminous bat-cave?
I've taken up running. Hahaha - I know, I know. I can totally confirm that I look like a Womble being chased off someone's front garden, having inadvertently wandered over looking for buns. But in the course of these hilarious runnings I've noticed that Haringey council has erected a great number of bat-boxes in the local parks, thither and yon, up the trees. All well and good, of course: if we can't help out our old pal the bat from time to time, really, what's the point? You've got to love those loveable, flying black-leather rats related to Dracula.

However, yesterday - on sweatily collapsing past my fifteenth bat-box - I began to wonder about the bat-box decor policy, such as it may be. After all, bats are blind. What, then, is the point of painting their boxes a luminous neon orange, the kind of colour Mr C from the Shamen would paint his Ibizan retirement house, Dunravin'? It can't be of any use to the bats, who quite notably don't, in nature, live in luminous orange caves or fluorescent green attics. And indeed, for whatever petty survival reasons they have, prefer to remain hidden from the world while they're asleep. On the other hand, if anyone wants a bat, I can, for a cash-in-hand deal, source a load quite quickly.

Mouse to moose
It's a long story but, in a nutshell, a very clever lady told me last week that I don't know how to breathe. “You're doing tiny, shallow, panting breaths, like a mouse,” she said. “You're hardly alive! Breathe from your GUTS!” On the bus home - breathing deeply, like a moose doing yoga, despite the stares - I realised that, in all these years of part-time smoking, I haven't been after the nicotine at all. It makes me dizzy. I retch. My enjoyment of smoking has centred almost wholly around the fact that it's the only time I ever take in a big lungful. Since then I've been studiously improving my breathing by pretending to smoke “invisible fags”. Currently, I'm on 3,400 a day.

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