Heaven save us, am I weary of personality in politics! Bored of red dresses and amateur psychology, body language, stiletto jokes and balls about who-hates-Balls! It goes beyond party - I hate both Mandelson's analysis and hostile analyses of Mandelson, David Cameron's damn bike and Margaret Beckett's caravan. I do not care who is “comfortable in their skin” or whether they “find a voice”.

As for Tony Blair's alleged comments about the “darkness in Gordon's heart” (the marshmallow religiosity of that man could turn Mother Teresa to the dark side), it comes ill from a man whose own heart is presented as something shiny from Claire's Accessories, worn on the sleeve. Personality politics rots even the best leaders. I am even getting sick of Barack's Dream Marriage. All of you up there, I beg of you - get on with your jobs and stop trying to charm us!

And don't blame the media. It's you who feed us these lurid Smarties, with your grinnings and schmoozings and trembly references to your family. It's you who leap on every fleeting nonsense about Deirdre from Coronation Street or Susan from BGT. Sure, we react - but that's no reason to play along. As every teenage vamp knows, just because the boys whistle when you pull your skirt up, that is no reason to keep on pulling it up until there's nothing private left.

Trying to be lovable may help electorally in the short term - though on the doorstep people are more exercised about schools and drains - but in the end it makes us queasy. The rubber TV brick was in use again yesterday when Andrew Marr gloated at the “raw primal emotion” of politics, accompanied by Tina Brown simpering about how lovely Sarah B sat next to J.K.Rowling at a party, and how Gordon is like Rocky in the movie. Then Mandelson himself, puzzlingly dismissing his own e-mails as “tittle- tattle” and praising his leader's calm strength...

Lord Mandelson repels me, personally. But note: that wouldn't matter if government were efficient. None of this personal junk matters. Mr Brown could be a werewolf for all I care, if only his administration worked properly. Overall policy does matter - though not as much as politicians pretend, because it must bend and twist in response to events. But the overridingly important thing is decent administration. Government must make things work, so we can get on with our lives. That needs only the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. The cult of personality is inimical to all of these.

At the best, the desire to look good takes politicians' eyes off the ball and brings the wrong people close to the heart of power. It squeezes out the earnest, the technically competent, the apparently dull, and makes leaders surround themselves with those who are mainly good at fluffing up novel initiatives with which the leader can be identified (remember that Tony Blair memo of 2000?). At worst it causes actual maladministration: waste on peripherals, diversion of resources to frippery, half-cock projects and the ignoring of warnings from anxious public servants.

Reason and proportion hit hype and are replaced by precipitate action: Dangerous Dogs Acts, counter-productive vetting bureaucracies, or a panicky and pointless VAT cut followed by expensively commissioned survey interviews by phone to find out how the cut affects even marginal businesses. On Friday it took 15 minutes of publicly funded time, as well as my own, to tell the researcher and her tick-boxes that the change had no impact whatsoever on the infrastructure of my, er, scribbled notebook. As to more serious matters like poverty, we are given solutions which are cosmetically designed: working-family tax credits designed to feel like goverment largesse, rather than the simple expedient of raising the tax threshold so that workers keep their own money in the first place.

What we rarely get is sober management. Things are left unregulated which should be regulated (like the banks), and other things regulated which should be private (like HIPs). Children find there is no primary school place because immigration and education figures were never joined up. GP contracts are bungled, resulting in expensive and dangerous flying-in of foreign locums. Budgets are cut, then reinflated by the huge bureaucracies to administer “economies”.

Desperate warnings on prison overcrowding are ignored until the only option is to let hundreds out into the hands of an overstretched Probation Service; so we end up with a sadistic murder and the unsurprising news that the visibly dangerous Dano Sonnex was “managed” by a newly qualified officer with a caseload of 127, in a situation repeatedly and hopelessly signalled by probation officers.

It is things like this that bother voters, not Gordon Brown's “ease in his skin” or whether Caroline Flint was disrespected for minxing around in a tight dress. The Probation Service, indeed, is currently a good example of both inattentive government and failed democracy: as I pointed out weeks ago, there is a quiet residential cul-de-sac on the edge of Oxford where the residents are struggling - in the face of half-truths and prevarication - to raise tens of thousands for a legal fight against a new probation mega-centre at the end of their street, funnelling 350 offenders a week past front gardens and nursery schools to “victim empathy sessions” and sex offender workshops. And this in spite of a stabbing outside the existing probation office, and a disastrous 2007 parallel in Kitts Green, Birmingham, for which ministers had to apologise.

Everyone has examples. A few weeks ago I illustrated how NHS management failed to notice a national announcement and written guidelines about co-payment for cancer drugs, and continued impeding a dying patient's rights. Last week this paper exposed the cheese-paring managerialism of “reverse auctions” for care of the elderly, with disgusting results unnoticed by ministers busy bickering on TV.

You think this all takes us a long way from the cult of personality? I don't. Building an image takes up attention, effort and money (ask any diva). The setting of unglamorous priorities, and careful listening to people on the front line for longer than a camera's flash are not always compatible with buffing one's image. But we all know which comes first. The good news is that the electorate are now so sick of the whole shebang that something will happen. It may be dangerous, but it will be different.

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