When our Prime Minister was told in the House of Commons this week that he had transformed from “Stalin to Mr Bean,” he didn't take it too well. I am here to reassure Gordon Brown that, as makeovers go, it's a pretty good one.

The sure sign that the joke hit its mark was the inverse proportion of the reaction of the target to that of the audience: the cameras cut away to show Mr Brown's face of thunder, while most of the other spectators, TV viewers included, could not resist a laugh. The gibe hit on a truth: that's what hurt and made it funny in equal measure. Mr Brown's recoiled body and pursed mouth were, as if to prove the point, perfectly Beanish.

But wait — is being Bean such a bad thing to be? Isn't he, like it or not, an emblem of Mr Brown's central political theme: Britishness?

Yes, his defining trait is ineptness, as played by the silent laureate of awkwardness, Rowan Atkinson. Personally, I find Mr Bean so unfunny he makes me feel a bit sick, the quality the novelist Will Self referred to when he said: “Mr Bean has always struck me as profoundly disturbing: a portrait of a mentally handicapped man struggling with the alienated, modern world.”

Only Mr Brown's harshest critics would agree with that, but of course the Bean comparison refers not so much to the political bungles of recent weeks, but the Prime Minister's social clumsiness. As Atkinson said of his character, he “has a slightly alien aspect to him”.

Yet this is also what international audiences find so amusing about Mr Bean, so endearing, and ultimately, so British. More than 14 million of his videos have been sold, and his latest film, released earlier this year, was number one in 21 countries, top of the international box office. He is a premium British export; his appeal transcends race or religion.

Around the same time as the launch of the Bean film, Iranian warships seized 15 Royal Navy personnel. One, Arthur Batchelor, said that all he could understand of his “terrifying” interrogation was when his captors mentioned the name of the celluloid buffoon.

“All I could make out in their language were the words ‘Mr Bean'... They were laughing at me... making me feel three inches tall.”

Were his guards tormenting poor Arthur, or were they, as I think more likely, simply chatting about the British, and what came to mind, what crossed the cultural divide, was our ever-popular Ambassador Bean?

What great self-confidence it shows in our nation, that we are assured enough to have others laugh at us like this. As Mr Bean knows, it is the Mini drivers who are the real men, not those that storm around the world in Humvees. He is modest, yet wildly successful. Wouldn't Mr Brown want a bit of that? Or at least, it's a better legacy than a Russian genocidal maniac.

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