Gordon Brown looks so happy these days, doesn't he? Not the Gordon Brown we've been used to - some gigantic, saturnine cliff-face stomping through Whitehall, alarmed kittiwakes circling his head as he goes. God, he used to look so thunderous. As if he'd woken up to find that the cat had done a wee in his slipper - every single day of his life. And then! Found in the other slipper - a poo!

In previous idle moments, I've tried to imagine him in the most incongruous situations, given his whole, very-much-not-interested-

in-going-to-Club-Tropicana-thank-you-very-much demeanour: playing beach Frisbee - in a suit and overcoat; on a stag night in Newcastle - with plastic breasts tied to his briefcase; at singalong Mamma Mia! - but sitting at the back, at a desk, using one of those old-fashioned adding machines with the crank-handle at the side.

Now, however, it's all changed. In the past few weeks, Brown has gone from looking like the spooky, deserted house at the bottom of the street that you ran past, into a man practically skipping through his life, like a girl in new shoes. In most men, this would be a sign that he had begun a passionate and transformative affair - probably with a classy divorcée, such as Cherie Lunghi. But in Brown's case, it is not. This palpable helium joy comes not from getting his end away with the manageress in a presidential suite, then having spa treatments while eating pomegranates, but from everything going to s***.

How happy is Brown about the putative end of the First World? Borderline delirious. He's having the time of his life. Since the stock markets began plunging, and he's had to sort it all out with some fancy-footed, hardcore, £37 billion accounting, he's been making spontaneous speeches, cracking jokes - “Just another bank that needs help!” he said when his phone rang during a press conference - and beaming like a teenage boy who's just found a copy of Razzle in a hedge.

And no wonder. Have you seen the international press he's getting? Paul Krugman, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, asks in The New York Times, “Has Gordon Brown saved the world financial system?” and says that he may have shown us the way through this crisis. The NYT, a bit more razzily, headlined the piece: “Gordon Does Good”. “I am not Flash Gordon - just Gordon,” Brown said modestly when a journalist at a press conference asked: “Are you a superhero?”

All this chaos makes him so happy because, finally, he's got something to do that he's good at. I think we've all realised by now that Brown isn't in the “laid-back entertainer” mould of prime minister. There isn't the slight whiff of having attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School at the same time as Annabella Lwin from Bow Wow Wow, as there was with Tony Blair. Brown isn't good at “connecting with the populace”. If he'd been on duty when Diana, Princess of Wales, died his press conference speech would have consisted of: “I solemnly promise the taxpayer that I will bring this state funeral in at under £800, including the buffet.”

No, what Brown really loves . . . craves . . . comes to life for . . . is an horrific accounting nightmare. Give him a really, really difficult sum - one on which the entire security of the First World rests - and he is, in the words of Westlife, flying without wings. He likes it when a tear-stained permanent secretary walks into a room, bearing gigantic piles of jumbled paperwork, sobbing: “Prime Minister, we're so sorry, but we don't think we've got even half the relevant files, and the only person who understood which order they came in has been poisoned by an apple, given to him by a mysterious tinkerwoman who came knocking at the back door.”

He is exactly what a prime minister should be: the highest-ranking civil servant in Britain. Someone who really gets off on admin. Someone who totally understands the filing system better than anyone else. If I believed in God, I would feel that His purpose in creating nerds was so that they might rule our countries; justly, wisely and breaking only to do the Countdown conundrum at 4.30pm.

Sadly, however, I suspect that Brown is the last prime minister of this kind - clever, hardworking and dull - we'll ever have. The electoral process now seems to be slaloming towards some manner of X Factor cabaret, whereby you can run this country only if you can both triumph in an Abba medley and cry on cue about your dead nan. Look at who we think is going to be the next prime minister: David Cameron. When you gaze upon him, you just know that his idea of being prime minister is flying to Cannes on a private jet and being photographed putting an arm around Nelson Mandela. He would not get excited about cranking up a thermonuclear calculator at 4am to save HBOS.

So, ultimately, alas for Brown. If he were a little more cheesy, a little more showbiz, he would have delayed his amazing Magic Sums Plan for six months and waited until credit-crunch orphans were roaming the streets, wailing for bread crusts, and an APR of 14.5 per cent.

As it is, he stepped in at the first sign of trouble and fixed things with the minimum of fuss. Because of him, for most of us, the credit crunch looks as if it's going to be a bit like Bobby Ewing dying in Dallas: we thought it had happened, and we were very, very sad, but then we woke up in the shower and found it had all been a dream. As a result, this country will now probably behave like a bunch of ungrateful children at the next election and sack Brown in favour of some shallow, perma-tanned oik who will enjoy appearing on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Take-away, duetting with Leon Jackson on an Ace of Base medley.

Personally, I think Brown is a bit of a super-hero. A dull, nerdy, borderline-OCD superhero. But when you look at the roll call of superheroes - Peter Parker, Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne - you remember: they never got any credit for what they did, either.

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