A SAD GAP is left in the landscape by the early death of Tony Banks (impossible to think of him as Lord Stratford, which he called his “nom de politics”). I sat next to him at a Boat Show lunch when he had just, to his surprise, been made Minister of Sport. He was very funny company, although perhaps not in quite the tone his yachtie hosts hoped. He told me I was missing a lot by not watching football and I told him he should try sailing, which caused him to roll up his eyes in old Labour horror as if I had suggested he join the Royal Yacht Squadron. It was impossible not to warm to him.

Later on, I got irritated by his one-sided hunting rhetoric and was shocked when he said, resigning as an MP to join the House of Lords he despised, that dealing with constituents’ problems is “intellectually numbing and tedious in the extreme”. I am sure that is true, but well-paid MPs with gold-plated pensions are graceless and ungrateful to say so. Constituents, as well as animals, have rights. But never mind that; the only difference between Tony Banks and MPs who say the same in private is that he came right out with it. He didn’t care whom he annoyed.

So we will miss him. In the same way, we will miss Charles Kennedy as leader of the Liberal Democrats. He was brave and principled over Iraq, he is no fool, yet he has a useful sense of the absurd and can both make and take a joke. Now that all three main parties are set to be led by vanilla-flavoured, carefully spoken “straight sort of guys” there is a temptation to get sentimental over our maverick MPs — maverick, in the Westminster village definition, meaning anyone who rashly allows their human idiosyncrasies to shine through the political veneer.

It is axiomatic to despise “clones”, “Blair Babes” and carefully spun images, and to lament the good old days when Edward Heath raced yachts aggressively and conducted orchestras badly, or Winston Churchill soaked up whisky, took long afternoon naps, and once insisted that a quarantine vet should release a gift lion cub on to the Cabinet table on its way to London Zoo. Some go farther back to mourn the days when earnest Mr Gladstone brought prostitutes to No 10 for tea and tracts, or Ramsay MacDonald contacted his late wife through a medium (Carole Caplin is nothing new). We media pretend to love human diversity, and shake our heads in sadness at the dull ways and weasel words of modern politicians; I am sure that if George Galloway meets with a fatal accident during his promised lapdancing lesson on Celebrity Big Brother there will be many crocodile tears.

But it is hypocritical of media commentators to complain about politicians disguising their rich humanity. We, ourselves, have done this to them. It is our fault. We mock, we sketch-write, we bestow cruelly apt nicknames (“Chatshow Charlie”), we force them to iron out everything that does not fit in with our template of middling ordinariness. If they speak robustly and wittily we accuse them of “gaffes”. If they admit that they don’t know something — anything — we pour contumely on them.

Take Boris Johnson. He is incomparably the most intelligent, well-read and energetic of younger Conservative MPs; his columns breathe great humanity and good sense; he is courageous and has a decent integrity (note that he did not write that Liverpool column in The Spectator himself, but took full responsibility for it and never outed the real author). On Desert Island Discs he observed that if he tried hard he probably could produce a grave sober soundbite for any occasion, but that the strain of this ridiculous exercise might make him “explode” — which is a perfectly reasonable human response to the entrapping demands we in the clever-dick trade constantly make on politicians.

Yet for all his merits, Boris Johnson could never have been leader of his party, and is only, cautiously, given a fairly minor front-bench opposition job. And why? Because he is “Beano Boris”, because he has a shock of mad blond hair, because he says “Crikey Moses!” and makes fun of himself, because he himself says: “My chances of being PM are about as good as finding Elvis on Mars, being decap itated by a Frisbee or reincarnated as an olive.” His own version of the constituency surgery problem is more mellow than Tony Banks’s — he gently observes: “The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP, they have run out of better ideas.”

Some might argue that the reason Boris Johnson’s upward path is blocked is not so much his merry overspill of character as his episode of publicised adultery. Nonsense: plenty of adulterers make it to the top or stay there, having ditched spouses or taken over other people’s. Their secret is to stay bland. The thing which really sinks a serious British political career is rampant, undisguised character.

The unforeseen result of this British approach to political reporting is a toxic twin track. Either MPs are ambitious and become carefully dull and skilled in meaningless circumlocution; or else they accept that they won’t ever make it to the top and become clowns, acting more like columnists than statesmen. They shout in the House like Dennis Skinner or chuck out random insults like Tony Banks (remember Kenneth Clarke as a “pot-bellied old soak ”, or the Liberal Democrats as “woolly-hatted, muesli-eating Tory lickspittles”). At least when you opt for the clown route you get lionised and offered media space.

But neither the bland bores nor the court jesters are really doing the job. Legislative and representative work is hard, often dull, finicky and laborious; yet it also demands imagination and empathy and principle and conviction. If we, the media, won’t let MPs exercise both at once, we can’t complain if we end up with a duff Parliament.

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