It was our new PM’s first Prime Minister’s Questions. This former Times parliamentary sketchwriter was back in his old haunt at the House of Commons to watch. The Press Gallery was packed. Brownie journalists (their clubhouse, a lonely place for a decade, suddenly cheerful with new recruits) had high hopes; Brown sceptics (once a majority, now suddenly isolated as our old comrades slink sheepishly away) were slavering for a parliamentary road accident.

Whom would the great man vindicate, the critics or the fans? Wet blanket that he is, Gordon Brown disappointed everyone. He failed to fly and he failed to crash. He was simply dull – but then he always was. Whatever possessed us to think that after more than half a century of stomping along in an intensely boring way, a man is likely all at once to take wing? Whatever possessed us to imagine that after a decade of shouting triumphalist non-answers at frustrated interrogators, he would suddenly be stumped? So on we stomp towards a leaden horizon. This pig won’t weigh as much as we think – but then we never thought it would.

And snakes alive, it’s going to be tedious. Thank heavens I got out of sketchwriting when I did.

I promise not to make a habit of using this column as a classified-section Lost & Found, but if there’s a Mr N. Robinson out there, working for the BBC, would he get in touch with a view to returning a pair of unobtrusive cuff links borrowed from me in Manchester two Sundays ago for use on the Andrew Marr programme on BBC Two before the Labour Party deputy leadership contest? I’ve only got two pairs: the other has a big Conservative & Unionist crest on each cuff link, and, no Nick, you can’t have those.

Speaking of which, I’m a bit unsettled about the shafting of Mr Maude as Tory chairman, to make way for Caroline Spelman. Francis wasn’t a barrel of laughs but then he was never supposed to be. He was appointed to get some grim truths over to the party and he was doing his job. I realise there are organisational reasons why the man now placed in charge of the general election campaign – the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne – needed a crowd-pleasing second-divisioner as chairman of the party, and Spelman should do that well; plainly the Tories think an election may be coming. But Maude is an intelligent friend to David Cameron and a true believer. Such people should be cherished.

As a boy I was told by my Oxbridge headmaster in Swaziland that in England a gentleman never wears brown shoes with a grey or blue suit in town.

Fearful of Tim Hames’s strictures on improper dress, I have tried, however shabbily, to stick to that. But I’m noticing that in today’s London very respectable people indeed – better-dressed than me – are beginning to wear brown shoes with any suit. Was I wrong, I asked a smart friend, James Landale, of BBC News 24? James’s brow furrowed.

“The question doesn’t arise,” he said. “One doesn’t wear brown shoes at all.”

Anatole Kaletsky was right to argue on these pages last week that what he called the “underclass” in Britain is one of knottiest problems a new British prime minister faces. It becomes ever clearer that it is falling behind. Politicians and experts call for “ladders out” for the poorest.

Have we considered the possibility that these ladders may be the problem, not the solution? There are already ladders out. There have never been more. People who can climb have climbed them. Those who are left cannot climb. They represent an expensive nuisance, disproportionate to their numbers, but they can be fenced and contained.

The barbarian onslaught that overheated commentary thinks they threaten will be easily repulsed. They are more pathetic than fearsome. They are irrelevant. That is the tragedy.

As I watched Harriet Harman, sitting beside Gordon Brown in the Commons chamber yesterday, a thinks bubble containing a question mark floated momentarily over my head until I remembered that she has been elected deputy leader of the Labour Party.

So what was all that about, then? Do you remember the brouhaha two weeks ago – a whole conference in Manchester, just to announce it? I can’t believe I had my ear glued to the radio and notebook in my hand as the fiendishly complicated voting figures were read out. We might better have played Poohsticks, betting on which stick will pass under a bridge and emerge first from the other side. Anyway, the Harman stick won.

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