Is this a dagger he sees before him? He wanted to be known as Heathcliff, the tortured, brooding anti-hero created by Emily Brontë and immortalised by Kate Bush, the pop singer. But the British public sees Gordon Brown somewhat differently.

According to a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times, the parallels between the prime minister and Shakespeare’s Macbeth are just too close to be ignored.

A third of people likened him to the eponymous regicide of the Scottish play, compared with only 2% who could imagine him wandering the moors in Wuthering Heights.

The charitable explanation would be that people just see him as another doomed Scottish leader. However, the overweening and ruthless lust for power and betrayal of friends — “thou play’dst most foully for ’t” — may also come into it.

Or perhaps it was that, like Macbeth, once his “vaulting ambition” got him the top job it all went badly wrong.

It could have been worse for Brown. Next to Macbeth, 11% likened him to Dickens’s Uriah Heep, “very ’umble” but insincere. The next most popular choice, with 9%, was Macavity the Mystery Cat.

The devious feline of T S Eliot’s poem was suspected of masterminding all sorts of mischief, but always managed to be well away from the scene when the crime was done, “a-licking of his thumbs, Or engaged in doing complicated long-division sums”.

When Tony Blair was prime minister, Brown’s disappearances during political storms became the stuff of Westminster legend.

As a tribute to the prime minister’s long stint as a tax-raising chancellor, 6% likened him to Oliver Twist, always asking for more.

Three per cent thought Dr Dolittle fitted the bill, more because they felt the name fitted an image of inactivity rather than for any particular skill in talking to animals, as the main character did in the book and film. Another 2% named Mr Pooter, the clerk from Diary of a Nobody with a life of unchanging suburban routine but ideas of social grandeur.

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