GEORGE GALLOWAY, Charles Kennedy, Tony Blair and David Cameron may not seem natural housemates. But they have all been competing in the new celebrity gameshow, I’m Not Really a Politician, Vote for Me . . .

This is not celebrity politics on the glamorous Hollywood model pioneered by that other Kennedy, John F. It is more celebrity politics on the banal scale of reality TV, where you try to connect with the audience by advertising your ordinariness or showing your feelings.

The aim is to counter the image problem of our discredited political class. The result is to expose the empty (show) business that politics has become.

Galloway has been criticised for hanging out in the Celebrity Big Brother house rather than the House of Commons. But he is only following the trail blazed by Blair. With parliament reduced to a hollow shell, our celebrity Prime Minister is always seeking out non-political platforms to project his “pretty straight kind of guy” image, from the GMTV couch to the MTV studio. Similarly, Galloway’s Respect party claims that Celebrity Big Brother has helped him to appear “as a human being”. And while the self-styled leader of the anti-war movement seeks status by rubbing shoulders in the CBB house, the leader of the war party does the same by inviting bigger celebrities to his house, Chequers, for the weekend.

Charles Kennedy was an unremarkable figure indulged for being an “ordinary, decent bloke”, game for a laugh and up for a drink. He became a celebrity politician in much the same way that Howard, the bloke plucked from behind the bank counter to appear in Halifax adverts, became a celebrity cashier. But when Mr Kennedy was not getting legless, what did he stand for? In the classic definition of celebrity, he was famous for being famous rather than anything he achieved. As for David Cameron: from emphasising that he too is an ordinary decent chap, to asking for Bob Geldof’s autograph and starting a heated debate about chocolate oranges, he looks like another contestant in the celebrity house. No wonder a new Tory MP, one of Cameron’s top aides, wants to appear on Strictly Come Dancing. I fear it is goodbye Punch and Judy politics, hello to the politics of Richard & Judy.

• TO MR KENNEDY, “a meal without wine is not a meal at all. He sometimes takes port after lunch, and always after dinner . . . In the late afternoon he calls for his first whisky and soda . . . He likes a bottle of champagne at dinner. After the ritual of port, he sips the very finest Napoleon brandy. He may have a highball in the course of the evening.”

  Of course, this quote from a private secretary is not about Charles Kennedy, but Winston Churchill. Now that binge drinking is presented as the decline-and-falling over of civilisation, while the therapeutic and pleasurable aspects of alcohol are denied, it would be impossible for any political leader (especially of the illiberal Liberal Democrats) to claim, after Churchill, “I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me”.

  Still, changing times at least mean that Kennedy might take something out of admitting he is an alcoholic. Our addiction to pathological victimhood means that alcoholism is depicted as a disease for which the sufferer is not responsible. Thus it has been suggested that Kennedy “could not help” his drinking.

  Perhaps the much-travelled path to celebrity redemption beckons, through rehab and Heat magazine. But it is hard to imagine Churchill or other past leaders who liked a drink being labelled “helpless”.

• BRITAIN IS the country at the highest risk of an H5N1 avian flu outbreak, according to a survey of the impact of a global pandemic, because of our high levels or urbanisation and international travel.

  Well, maybe. On the other hand, the 78 people who have died from H5N1 all contracted it directly from birds, in societies where many still live cheek-by-beak with their chickens. The three children whose deaths started the panic in Turkey had been playing with an infected bird’s head. A potential pandemic-causing strain that could spread from human to human still does not exist, and may never do.

  Somehow living in a highly developed society where children play with video games, not infected fowl skulls, doesn’t seem like the highest risk on Earth to me.

  Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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