That’s the life of the modern democratic leader for you, as illustrated by two statesmen in the space of a fortnight. You start off your career by being given the Nobel Peace Prize, and you finish up being quizzed about whether or not you pop pills.

It’s like one of the memento mori tombs in which the great man lies, robed, in his pomp above, but down below there reclines his naked and decomposing corpse. To this you will come. Or, as I read on a wall tomb in Lichfield Cathedral on Sunday: “Now from that graceful form and beaming face, insatiate worms the lingering likeness chase.”

It was rather awful that some Scandinavian, with headmistressly piety, should reward Barack Obama for trying so very hard to be good, and as an example to the other girls, rather than for anything the President had actually done. The same Scandinavian won’t be seen for dust when the great army of the disappointed extends beyond idiot leftists to include just about everyone who can pronounce the word “No-bel”. This was a distinctly unhelpful award.

Mr Obama will come to this pass one day: to a TV studio in which a leading mainstream journalist will ask him whether it’s true that he’s clinically depressed, that his wife is an alcoholic, his daughters are crack fiends, that he claimed five dollars for the dog’s worm pills, his hearing is going, or that he spent rather too long once, in an elevator with Natalie Portman, looking where a gentleman shouldn’t.

Gordon Brown came to it on The Andrew Marr Show, to my suprise. Although I knew there was loose-ish optimistic talk about his eyesight being used as a pretext for resignation, I had somehow not registered the flood of rumours about the Prime Minister’s supposed pill dependency. In Marr’s words: “Let me ask you about something else which everybody has been talking about out there in the Westminster village, which is a lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through. Are you one of those people?” No, said Mr Brown.

The journalistic world divided over Marr’s question. Some said he shouldn’t have asked it, some said it was a valid line of inquiry. Had not David Owen recently written a book in which he argued (and remember that Dr Owen is a proper stethoscope Dr and not a John Reid read-my-thesis kind of Dr) that we have had bad decisions as a result of undiagnosed or undisclosed illnesses on the part of leading politicians going back a ways?

So, many said, let the question be asked! Yes, but on what basis, demanded others. On the say-so (as in this case) of a retired, though blogging, ad executive who says he met an anonymous civil servant at a party in 2006 — a garrulous chap who reeled off a list of GB’s dietary requirements, requirements that the blogger believed (no dammit, that the blogger knew) proved that the PM was on powerful though old-fashioned antidepressants. End of evidence. Which means that there was, in fact, no evidence; everything else was internet howlaround in which insinuating journalists cited “internet rumours” and were in turn flourished as corroborating the story by rumour-mongering bloggers.

An unsubstantiated allegation, but so what? It’s a reasonable thing to ask you, Mr Brown, to which you may answer yes or no, because the public have an interest in knowing. As they do in such questions as: do you drink? Did you have your son immunised? How much does your wife earn? Do you get depressed? Is there a history of depression in your family? Did your spouse rent an adult movie and claim it back on expenses, unwittingly or not? What movie was it? Was it arousing? Do the children know about it? (Well, they do now.) And because it’s you, none of the privacy protection people turn a hair. You are fair game. You don’t have privacy. Your lack of it is the price you pay for power, the equivalent of, in Patrick Marber’s words, the “fame tax” that celebrities pay.

But there are three big problems here. First, “peu d’hommes ont été admirés par leurs domestiques” — no man is a hero to his valet. It is one of the qualities of leadership that it should be, within reason, idealised. Especially in a mature democracy, there is an enormous amount to be taken on trust (dictatorships don’t have to worry about this), and a belief that your PM or president is, in some way, a superior version of yourself — a father figure — helps to create such trust. If we insist on knowing exactly how much Churchill drinks or what pills Kennedy takes, then leaders cannot easily remain as respected fathers, let alone heroes. Their Nobel prizes simply become peaks from which their falls must be the more catastrophic.

Second, if the logic is that the public have a right of entry to the confessional, the boudoir and the consulting room of those in political office, then those who wield unelected or private power — business leaders, newspaper editors, broadcasters, quangocrats, bankers and public servants — must share the scrutiny with those who are elected. We should also know about their choices in education, their fidelity, their health, their moral status. If not, then matters are skewed in the favour of the wielders of unaccountable power.

The third problem is totally unexpected. In a world without deference, everyone can — and many do — aspire to power or fame, or at least seek to adopt the circumstances of the powerful and the famous. Today one of the great characteristics of the famous is the transparency of their lives. To be famous has always been to have people wanting to know all about you, but today they can know, from your cleaning arrangements to your beachwear.

So what might be changing is the next generation’s perception of their own privacy. Who, after all, but a hypocrite, a blogger or a journalist would deny to others what they allow themselves? And not being hypocrites our children take the lesson that privacy is unnecessary, overrated perhaps, associated more with neglect than care, with failure than success. There is much to say on this, but let’s just conclude for the moment by contemplating our own insatiate worms, who may very well have turned.

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