Do you know the word “shan”? It’s Scottish, I think, although they probably have it in parts of the North. I haven’t really heard it used much since I was at school, so it is in a school context that I always think of it. I remember squashing a beetle with a shoe once, before a gym class. The back half was flat but the front half was still waving its bits about in a morbid panic. “That’s shan,” cried everybody, and they were right, and I was ashamed.

Picking on somebody isn’t necessarily shan, but it can become so. It doesn’t just mean “cruel”. It carries connotations of unfairness and of moral wrongness. There is a suggestion in there that in any reasonable person what is going on should arouse compassion. Shan is what we are being to Gordon Brown. We’re bullying him. It bothers me.

In terms of the things I write (and, indeed, the thing I’m planning to write tomorrow) I’m probably on dodgy ground here. But mockery and bullying, I’ve always thought, are different things. I worry that we, the British press, bloggers, ultimately the British public, are moving from one to the other.

I started thinking it last weekend when Andrew Marr asked the PM, effectively, if he was on antidepressants. Setting aside the curious assumption in the question (that if we did have a depressed PM, it would somehow be better if he wasn’t taking anything), you have to wonder what Marr hoped to gain by asking it. It wasn’t as if Mr Brown was going to break down there and then, Nixon-style, and confess everything. It wasn’t even as if Marr was after an answer at all. He just wanted to ask the question. He just wanted to land a kick on the fat kid because all the other kids were kicking the fat kid and he wanted to be the one to make him fall over.

The Sun abused Neil Kinnock and everybody abused John Major, and obviously this PM isn’t the first politician to be ridiculed. But there’s a sense with him that we’re not just after a change, or a resignation, but an actual personal collapse.

Back at school, the people who got it worst were those who refused to crack. The bullies up the stakes and then everybody joins in. When a victim won’t accept that he is one, something in the natural order cries out that you ought to make him break. That’s when it gets shan. Another six months, maybe, until the election. I wonder how much we’ll all say and do, before then, that afterwards will make us feel slightly sick.

Penguin book ban

Why do they ban books in schools? I’m not talking about over here, obviously, where they don’t, but in the US, where Philip Pullman is apparently the second-most banned author. J. K. Rowling features in the top ten, too. The rest seem to mainly write about homosexual penguins.

Even if you think atheists, witches and certain types of penguin sex are the worst things in the world, banning books about them seems a very odd thing to do. When I was at school, at the age of 12, we read The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. “The Jew is everywhere,” says somebody, “but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him ... ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bathchair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes sir, he’s the man who is ruling the world just now.”

Not Buchan’s views, it must be said, but those of a character. Either way, that was my bar mitzvah year. I knew any number of very old Scottish Jews from the synagogue, and many of their faces where quite white, but this was absolutely my first inkling that some people thought these were the people ruling the world. For me evil is anti-Semitism. For some it’s a penguin called Bill, banging away at a penguin called Bob. But my point is, either way, wouldn’t you want your kids to know that it was out there?

Not such a sweet idea

Does nobody realise, anyway, that if we get rid of Gordon Brown, there’s a strong chance that we’ll end up with Harriet Harman? Can we face that? I mean, honestly? Her mind is awash with platitudes. She sounds like the human version of a tube of Love Hearts.

Did you hear what she said about The Sun ditching Labour? “Don’t get bitter, get better.” What does it mean? What does it mean? Get better at what?

She keeps doing this. Nothing she says means anything. Her joke about Arnold Schwarzenegger? It made me want to gouge out my own eyes with my thumbs. The Terminator, she said, had better “terminate” a California website that rated prostitutes. Otherwise, she declared, “I’ll be back”. But back where? Brighton? Where Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t?

It’s all so confusing. At least when John Prescott spoke nonsense, he sounded a bit like he knew it was happening. Harman says it like she means it, even though none of it means anything.

This isn’t bullying. It’s a serious political critique. I genuinely think that she might be turning into Baroness Thatcher.

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