I assume there must be someone in the country who thinks that Gordon Brown should remain prime minister, other than Gordon Brown. Our mental hospitals are full of troubled, damaged and deranged individuals, so he might have some support there. And then there’s David Cameron and the staff of Conservative Central Office. Two very similar constituencies, to my mind. But constituencies that are, in electoral terms, vanishingly small. With each day that passes, someone previously considered to be a loyal ally sticks the boot in and suggests that our prime minister is weak or vacillating or incompetent or doolally or all of these things. Then another opinion poll surfaces which shows that Brown is considered by the public to be less attractive and effective as a leader of our country than would be a Findus boil-in-the-bag cod in prawn-flavour sauce.

This endless onslaught must take its toll in some way; affect his behaviour. I bet he gets really tetchy with Sarah when he can’t, for example, find the remote control or his pants have not been aired properly. His demeanour in televised interviews is that of a man who has just looked in his wardrobe and noticed that the gusset has been snipped out of every pair of trousers he possesses. A demeanour that we once took for seriousness but is, more properly, ill-temper.

Given the daily odium sprayed at him, you would suppose that the recent malevolent contribution of a certain Fungus the Bogeyman, aka Charles Clarke, would not bother him unduly. Clarke, formerly a spectacularly unsuccessful home secretary, bears our prime minister an enmity that, even in the fraternal upper echelons of the Labour party, is remarkable for its acidic nature. This is far from the first time that Clarke has laid into Brown. In February, shortly after pledging his untrammelled loyalty to the prime minister, Clarke described him as “dithering” and said he had lost the confidence of the country. Also, that he presided over a “third-rate” cabinet, which tends to be the way Clarke describes cabinets that don’t have him in them.

Clarke said then he thought it important that he “open a debate” about the performance of the prime minister and his possible future - but he had already been beaten to it by himself. In 2006 he described Brown as “stupid” and then “absolutely stupid, stupid”. And then “stupid”. He also said that Brown smelt funny when you got up close, “like a piece of cauliflower that’s been left at the bottom of the vegetable rack for several weeks, you know?” Actually he didn’t say that bit, I made it up. But he said the other stuff.

This time around he suggested that Brown was leading the Labour party to “utter destruction” at the next general election and further accused him of - heaven forfend - dissing the scary and reptilian David Miliband. He added that the debate over the leadership of the party was not motivated by ideological differences. You know, I don’t think he needed to tell us that. It is motivated by intense personal dislike, spite, a keening for the departed Tony Blair and an abject terror by MPs of losing their seats. Indeed Clarke’s own seat, Norwich South, has an extremely vulnerable majority of just over 3,500, easily overturnable even by some dim-witted carpet-bagging toff with a wind turbine nailed to his forehead.

Well, they made their beds. When Blair left Downing Street to spend more time with his money, there was a marked absence of fervour among Labour MPs for a proper leadership election. They were overwhelmingly happy to make themselves fait accompli to some covert deal that may or may not have been struck 10 years previously. And Clarke? He at first said he would stand against Brown but then chickened out, showering the new leader with praise in expectation of a cabinet post. All of them know that another change of leader would provoke constitutional outrage; so they carp and whine impotently, surely knowing that every time they do so another nail is driven into their electoral coffin.

+ It is sometimes forgotten what an important part is played in public life by abuse and vituperation, as the management of the Metro hotel in Woking, Surrey, may well be reflecting this morning. Call it a vibrant expression of democracy, gentlemen.

The Metro contacted police after being inundated with abusive phone calls. Hopefully the police told it to get lost. The hotel had refused to give a room to a wounded British soldier who was in town to help sort out the funeral of a friend killed while on service.

“We have a policy of not letting rooms to members of the armed services,” some blank-faced cretin told Corporal Tomos Stringer (who was not in fatigues). He had to sleep in his car. He told his mum and she told the press – hence the abusive phone calls. Keep them coming, because while the Metro “apologised”, it was a very Tony Blairish apology – “Obviously I regret any offence caused, but I was right . . .” etc.

If Stringer had been turned away for being gay or a Muslim or a lard mountain, the hotel’s manager would be at the European Court of Human Rights by now.

Once a love rat, now a mouse
Scientists have isolated the so-called love-rat gene which compels some men – an estimated 40% of them, in fact – to cheat on their wives or girlfriends with that fruity new temp called Tasha they’ve just taken on in accounts. The rogue 334 form of the AVPR1A gene is the one that causes all the trouble, apparently – have a look to see if you’ve got it, or maybe your missus has already hidden it away in the attic or given it to a charity shop.

Previous studies have shown that the louche and amoral American meadow vole possesses this gene and as a consequence will dole out a good, if brief, seeing to to any even vaguely vole-like creature that crosses its path, regardless of what the wife and kids might think (or indeed are watching). Its cousin, the prairie vole, remains faithful to its partner even when the vole equivalent of Keira Knightley hammers at his door, wearing a thong, begging for whiskery subterranean love action. So they’ve injected prairie vole DNA into the poor meadow vole to cure its habit. You can see what’s going to happen, can’t you. One day errant men will be herded up in clinics for similar treatment and overnight thousands of restaurants, cheap hotels, divorce lawyers and female columnists will be out of work.

All this rain . . . obviously global warming

It is exactly one month to the day since the Fire Brigades Union put out a press release saying that Britain’s wildlife was in danger of being wiped out by the “tinder-dry” heathlands turning into raging bushfires, caused by global warming.

I thought now would be a good time to remind you of this, as you pump up the dinghy preparatory to braving your “tinder-dry” high street to buy a pint of milk. If you see any wildlife on the way, be so kind as to warn them of the coming apocalypse.

The floods, of course, are also caused by global warming – just like those hot dry summers at the beginning of the 1990s when we were warned that Essex would soon resemble Chad and we would all get skin cancer or die of thirst. That was global warming too.

I saw on television news on Friday a chap canoeing across part of the Arctic ocean to raise world consciousness about “disappearing” ice sheets. The last time I looked he was trapped in some ice. Meanwhile, the quantity of sea ice at the other pole has actually been increasing, something the global warming monkeys have a bit of trouble explaining.

There’s a handy guide to global warming on Channel 4’s website, written in the usual cretin-speak for kiddies. Summers will never be like they used to be, the site proclaims. “Your grandparents griped about the typical ‘three hot days and a thunderstorm’ which constituted summer when they were young.” Indeed, and continue to constitute them now that they’re old.

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