Gordon Brown wants us to know that he has the “E-factor”. That is “e” for empathy and not “eek”, by the way. He feels your pain. He’s there by your side in the supermarket and at the petrol station.

“I understand what people are thinking and I understand what people are feeling,” he insisted yesterday.

But does he really? Because it may not be very nice. Indeed, what I was thinking as I watched him on the Andrew Marr Show, all scrunched up and dressed for church, was that he didn’t seem so much a man who could feel our pain as a man who was in pain.

“People say you look very, very tired,” chirped Andrew.

“I don’t think I look that tired at all,” Gordon shot back, activating his weird smile.

Oh, Gordon. Look in the mirror. The eye bags are so heavy that, on an airline, you’d be fined for excess luggage. Do you look tired? No, you look exhausted. You have had the worst election since elections began. You have earned the right to look like a shipwreck. Just admit it.

“People say that you are a bit strange!” twittered Marr, as if he himself were entirely normal. Gordon looked puzzled. I must admit that I felt a pang of sympathy.

Andrew now defined what he had meant: “You are a workaholic old-style politician who doesn’t empathise in the sofa television way that people expect.”

And guess what? The workaholic old-style politician who cannot empathise on sofa television now proved that he could not empathise on sofa television.

He didn’t smile, make a joke or even note that, actually, this didn’t seem to be so much a television sofa as a psychiatrist’s couch. Instead he began, in his dogged and earnest way, to explain why he wasn’t strange.

“I come from a pretty ordinary background,” said the man who has spent the past 11 years living in Downing Street in one way or another. He told us that he had friends. “We are talking about things,” he noted proudly. “We are talking about sports!” He chuckled at the memory.

“We are talking about everything that is going on.”

It was impossible to watch this and not think: “My, but he’s strange.” It almost seemed cruel and I had to remind myself that he had put himself on that sofa (actually a chair but it’s all soft furnishings really).

It’s all part of his “fightback” and, we must assume, some sort of masterplan.

Actually, we could have done with more of a plan. He refused to tell us any details of how he’s saving our economy. Indeed, his only actual plan seemed to be that he wants to get out more and meet us. He wants to listen. He wants to empathise. He also wants to apologise. The man for whom sorry has been the hardest word now, suddenly, can’t stop talking about his mistakes, about the 10p tax cut, the general election that wasn’t, blah blah blah.

It’s all a bit much: if he knocks on your door, you might want to hide.

So, said Andrew Marr, who really should think about psychiatry as an alternative career, was there a new Gordon Brown to discover?

“I believe that the real Gordon Brown,” said the real Gordon Brown with another awkward chuckle, “is someone who is standing up at all times for hard-working families.”

OK, Real Gordon, here’s the deal. You stand up for hard-working families all you want but, please, don’t sit down again for a while on the television sofa. Show a little empathy: it’s just too painful for us to watch.

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