The ferocity with which Britain greeted Gordon Brown’s Biscuit Indecision has, I have to say, bewildered and alarmed me. Mumsnet, the parenting website, asked him to name his favourite biscuit, and it took him two days of stalling, to mounting public outrage, before he plumped for the Official Downing Street Choc Chip; by this point the PR horse had bolted and everyone seemed to have decided that he was a total bastard.

I’m alarmed because, if I look into my heart, I find that, really, I don’t like any biscuits. I know. I know. It’s me and Gordon in the noose now. I hope they make them with a double-loop.

Still, nonetheless, I firmly aver that biscuits are rubbish. Hooey. Cack-ola. Whereas cake is a soft, yielding, juicy item — all crumbs and buttery smears; often with an unexpected glacé cherry hidden in its wetter depths like a scarlet pearl full of lovely E numbers — a biscuit is just like some freaky offcut from a carpenter’s workshop that someone’s rubbed down with sugar for a laugh.

Let’s face it, biscuits were invented at a time when we didn’t have the technology to ship over all the constituent parts of a KitKat from Aztecland. We would never have invented the Rich Tea — essentially a coaster that has been misfiled in the biscuit tin, instead of the cupboard — if we’d had access to the deep magic of the cocoa bean.

Do you want to know what I dunk in my tea? A Bounty bar. Both bits. That’s a tea break. By comparison, biscuits are just ... snack dilettantism.

So this is why I am bewildered that the Prime Minister’s reluctance to quack on about his favourite biscuit — essentially a failure immediately to jump up and down on a chair shouting: “Jammy Dodgers! Jammy Dodgers! I love to eat the little man-faces full of jam, voters! I’m still a big kid inside, me!” — has met with such opprobrium.

GET OFF GORDON’S BACK! He’s trying to run an ENTIRE COUNTRY during a recession, with only one eye! Can we not give this man a break, and stop spaffing on about his choice of tea-break comestible like we think we’re McCarthy saying: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party,” but with the phrase “a person who eats garibaldis” instead of the “Communist” bit?

Isn’t this what has RUINED political discourse in this country — that we’d rather spend a WHOLE WEEK wonking on about which light refreshment a man takes, instead of, like, policies and stuff?

But then again, you know what? If we’re not to judge a man on his choice of biscuit, what, then, should we judge him on? For while I maintain that you cannot evaluate a person from their love of a politically correct chocolate chip, you certainly can from their love of, say, tinned, boiled potatoes.

Who does not — on seeing a tin of potatoes in a shopping trolley — have a moment of kaleidoscopic perspective on the whole personality of its prospective purchaser? If they give themselves a minute or two. It is the macrocosm in the microcosm. The arrival of that tin in that basket is the result of a thousand life-experiences, decisions, influences — all concluding in someone eating tonight some very wet spuds that taste of iodine. I cannot say that it’s a decision that doesn’t haunt me.

It’s as distressing and intimate a revelation of unhappiness as a book in the “misery memoirs” section of Waterstone’s called No Daddy — Not There.

Similarly, I cannot help but pass massive, instant judgment on people who buy gigantic multipacks of mineral water. As soon as I see them hauling the dead weight of 26 litres of Evian into their trolley — ironically, looking rather like some harassed Sudanese mother carting a pot of brackish water 15 miles back to her home, because she doesn’t have access to a tap — I judge, judge, judge, away, like Judge Judy. What, I scream in my head, are you doing? Are your kidneys so special that you have had to opt out of the public provision of water? Is this some manner of dandy dialysis? What is wrong with water out of the tap? It even comes in an intriguing novelty dispenser — more than 700,000 kilometres of piping; one of Britain’s greatest ever civil engineering programmes — so it has that vital “ponciness” factor you insane people so obviously crave.

And so it goes on. I would find it difficult to vote for someone who bought an own-brand ketchup instead of Heinz (Heinz is the totemic ketchup: purchasing anything else smacks of perversion), cheese and onion crisps instead of ready salted (just eat some cheese, and some onions. Don’t involve crisps in it), liked clear fairylights instead of coloured ones (COLOURED ONES ARE THE MAGIC ONES, OBVIOUSLY) or eschewed the Beatles in favour of, I dunno, Frank Zappa (someone so consumed with wilful iconoclasm that they’ve basically gone mad, and forgotten what true happiness is.) Although I am a cosmopolitan world traveller, these kind of differences in taste throw me as surely as someone suddenly shouting at me, urgently, in Gaelic, while pointing at my hair. I feel my surety of opinion rock — and most cataclysmically when I find out that someone uses a PC, instead of a Mac. I panic that I won’t understand a word they say. What if they try to conversationally right-click me? I WON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

So, yes. On the one hand, Gordon Brown’s Biscuit Lynching was about as shameful a moment in our political discourse as we’ve had in years.

Just as William Rees-Mogg asked, after the arrest of Mick Jagger: “Who would break a butterfly on a wheel?”

I ask: “Who would break Gordon on a Bourbon?”

Is that what we are doing to a public servant? If we’d found out that Churchill wasn’t actually drinking Pol Roger, but Lambrusco, would we have hounded him from office? Will Barack Obama finally be undone not by reform of the healthcare system, nor the balancing of the Budget — but the revelation that he thinks Bran Flakes are “well dry” and prefers Golden Grahams instead? Oh, we are an undeniably petty species.

On the other hand, though, if I hear that Gordon Brown thinks that Cheryl’s the best one in Girls Aloud, instead of Kimberley, I’m well voting Tory.

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