If everything is supposed to have changed in Britain since Tony Blair was in his pomp, how come bloody Coldplay are still No1? Their Chris Martin was the frontman for “Blairpop” - a generation of bland, well-mannered “rock” bands without a rock'n'roll bone in their healthy-living bodies, who rose to the top under new Labour.

In 2005, when the singer sent Mr Blair a love note declaring: “I think everything you're doing in terms of trying to sort the whole place out is BRILLIANT”, I called Martin “the musician that the Prime Minister always wanted to be, a prefect in the school of rock”. They shared an appearance of being all things to all men, with little real heart or soul behind it.

Three years on, Mr Blair and new Labour appear about as cool as Eurovision. Yet here are Coldplay, back on top of the album charts with their snappy toe-tapper Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. The songs seem if anything duller than before. Such is the morbid musical mood, however, that they still command, says one bigwig, “the broadest appeal of any band around”. Blairism rocks limply on.

God save Johnny Rotten, but it is a bad sign when the Sex Pistols' wrinkly frontman still sounds like the voice of youthful rebellion. Rotten (né John Lydon) has just laid into Coldplay as “utterly humourless... just men in anoraks... they looked like a bunch of little poncy masturbators”.

Which brings us back to politics post-Blair. He might have gone but, as with the music world, the bland song remains much the same. There have been no decent new tunes either from Gordon Brown's Government or David Cameron's Conservatives, cold players competing to appear inoffensive.

Enter David Davis dressed up as Johnny Rotten. Just as the middle-aged spreader Lydon can appear radical and dangerous by comparison with bloodless younger bands, so Mr Davis, a veteran fan of the Iraq war, 28-day detention and lower abortion limits, can now pass as an anti-Establishment rebel compared with other illiberal MPs.

Unlike those middle-aged men who lie about the hot tunes on their iPod, I am not even hip enough to pretend that I have one. But from a safe distance today's dull rock music scene reminds me of when I was a teenager in the mid-1970s era of deathly boring “supergroups”. Then along came punk to shake up our world. Music still awaits the new Johnny Rotten to do the same. In politics too, we are waiting for some new punks to shake things up.

As Chris Martin, the Blair fan, sings on the title track: “Revolutionaries wait/ For my head on a silver plate.” If only that were true...

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