From the window of my London flat as I listened to Gordon Brown interviewed by John Humphrys on the Today programme yesterday morning, I could see the Thames foreshore. Here it was that, on another morning years ago, we had been shocked to spot the corpse of an unfortunate man, beached just clear of the water.

Idly while listening to the Prime Minister on the radio, I recalled that scene. It had taken the police some time to arrive and we had kept watch over an otherwise empty foreshore. One of those amateur prospectors with metal detectors shuffled into view, moving slowly up the river by the water's edge, seeking coins in the shingle. Bobble-hat and scarf obscuring his face, head lowered and eyes fixed just in front of his boots, he poked, and moved, and poked a bit more and advanced again, inching his way towards a horror to which he was still oblivious. He had never raised his eyes.

Back in the present, I smiled as Humphrys tried to get his interviewee to lift his focus to the “vision for change” Mr Brown had promised, now disintegrated into a hundred banalities. But Mr Brown grunted repeatedly and monotonously about “making the right decisions for the future”, his attention locked on to the recitation of lists: lists of measures, and targets, and numbers.

And the interview inched painfully forward: dull, repetitive, cramped, never breaking out of a mental box of Mr Brown's own construction. Bored, I returned in my imagination to that sad, earlier scene by the river.

The man in the bobble-hat had, in the end, reached and seen the corpse. He had almost tripped over it. He froze. Then he lowered his head again and, averting his gaze, inched out a semicircular detour around the dead man. Tap, swing, tap, swing, he probed the shingle with his metal detector. Having passed the obstacle he locked back on to his previous trajectory along the shore, examining pebbles. Tap, swing, tap, swing...

Had he registered the human story? Had he blanked it? Did this obsessive embrace of the humdrum conceal a kind of shock?

As my attention returned to the radio, Humphrys had given up on the leadership question, and Mr Brown was talking about pensioners' heating, and cancelling a pay rise for prisoners of £1.50 per week.

I've been looking for a second-hand copy of a booklet of lectures long out of print, by the great (and underrated) Lord Justice of Appeal and conservative jurist, the late Patrick Devlin, later Lord Devlin. The booklet is called The Enforcement of Morals and I've finally found it via the internet from an online bookseller. It arrived by post, along with a leaflet listing other books from the same trader which, if interested in The Enforcement of Morals, I might want too. The first was called Lusty Young Sluts.

On a different quest I've drawn a blank. For BBC Radio 4 I present a series called Great Lives. Each programme invites a well-known person to choose a figure whose life (now over) they particularly admire; and, along with an expert and what archive material we can gather, we discuss the life. But there's one great figure I myself admire whom, to my frustration, no guest seems to choose. Henry VII.

With an hour to kill last week I called in at the National Portrait Gallery off Trafalgar Square just to stare at the celebrated portrait, by an unknown artist, of the unprepossessing-looking Henry. When this proud and very private man died in 1509 he left to his more colourful Tudor successors an England that might be said to be the beginning of a modern state, with an effective revenue-raising system set up, expensive wars settled, trade and commerce fostered and the public finances in good shape.

These are exactly the political virtues we miss in today's politicians. But can I find a single celeb to champion Henry? No joy.

Reader, are you a little bit famous, and do you admire Henry Tudor? You needn't be an expert. Drop me a line.

Today, many of us go to the polls. These local and mayoral elections will be followed by allegations of the abuse of postal voting. Some will be well founded.

You know, there's no need to debate how we might reform this. We managed without much postal voting until recently and could do so again. With a few tiny exceptions for special circumstances, we could simply abolish it. Why are the simple answers too complicated for think-tanks and politicians?

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