January 6: Dave gets angry

New year, new Dave. The man was bursting with a frantic and almost hysterical energy yesterday as he marked the beginning of 2009 with a Dave blitz.

Perhaps Gordon Brown’s gibe that the Tories are the “do nothing” party has hit home.

But yesterday David Cameron did something, and that was to get angry. I woke up to Dave on the Today programme and he sounded like a man who had been up since 4am, working himself up into an absolute fury. He announced that Britain’s “landscape” was “terrifying”.

Groggily I wondered what John Constable would make of that. What would Hay Wain Horror! actually look like?

“I feel like SHAKING the Prime Minister sometimes,” he cried, “and saying: ‘LOOK, what don’t you get?’ It’s a credit crunch! That’s what needs to be addressed!

“Stop WASTING our money with cutting VAT. So get with the programme!”

Get with the programme? How about get off the programme? I didn’t like the image of Dave shaking Gordon (all those flapping jowls, very dangerous to passers-by).

I yearned for the 8am pips followed by all that soothing news from Gaza.

There is only so much Unhappy New Year talk you can take before breakfast but I suspect we will get used to this in 2009.

April 22: The PM on YouTube

Gordon Brown made his announcement on MPs’ expenses to himself via a video camera in front of a lovely white marble fireplace at No 10. I can see why he chose a fireplace as an audience: its reaction to everything is: “That’s grate!”

No 10 will post this fireside chat on YouTube, hoping for five stars and lots of “Gr8!” comments.

This seems unlikely as fireplaces can’t type and the YouTube electorate can be brutal. (The last comment on Gordon’s “I Saved the World” video was: “This scum should hang for treason.”) And it will be hard to beat the popularity of his most-watched video, Gordon Brown Picking His Nose, with 4.5 stars.

But this one is good in a bad sort of way. The video begins jerkily. You get the feeling the PM was chatting happily to himself into a two-way mirror when, suddenly, someone (his therapist?) hit the wrong button.

He is smiling and rocking from side to side, as if on a donkey at the seaside. He wants to scrap the second-home allowance and give MPs extra money for coming to Parliament. Wow. Extra money for coming to work. This was a draconian crackdown.

There was lots more swaying and eyebrow action. Mr Brown’s private party peaked when, as he told us that he wants MPs to approve his proposals next week, he almost burst into laughter. So what’s the rating? I’m with the fireplace here: five stars.

May 6: Drooling over Joanna

The voice was bewitching, the manner beguiling. Joanna Lumley leant forward, looking directly into the eyes of Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, as he asked her if she had tried to meet the Prime Minister over the Gurkha issue. In a voice that was so husky with hurt we could hear the bruises, Ms Lumley said: “I wrote to the Prime Minister three times — and my letters haven’t been acknowledged.”

Mr Vaz, who worships celebrity, looked shocked, for he can imagine no circumstance where he would have ignored even a sentence from such a wonderful (and wonderfully famous) creature.

“Do you think such a meeting would have been helpful?” he asked. Now it was Ms Lumley’s turn to look shocked. “Yes!” she said with an intense breathiness that seemed replete with meanings: yearning, yes, but also regret and a remembrance of what might have been.

My, but it was a performance. The MPs adored her. It wasn’t so much a hearing as an organised drool. Her demeanour was faultless as she told MPs that she had just learnt that, despite the vote in Parliament, nothing had changed for Gurkhas. “I don’t understand democracy if this is not what democracy is,” she breathed. As MPs rushed to her aid, I marvelled at her skill. As someone once would have said: “Darling, you were fabulous, absolutely.”

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