It occurs to me that, with all this stress, Gordon may be having the time of his life

The assumption, of course, is that Gordon Brown isn’t having much fun. That is what lurks behind the question, every time. On Monday’s Today programme, when Ed Stourton asked him if he was enjoying being Prime Minister, we all knew the presenter was not being entirely honest. He didn’t really mean ‘Are you enjoying it?’ He actually meant ‘Are you hating it?’

This is what we all want to know. This, indeed, is what we all suspect. We think he’s hating it. We think he’s going nuts. We think he wants to stay in bed each morning, with the covers pulled up around his head, making a pudding-faced duvet version of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’. We think he’s enjoying himself about as much as Richard Nixon enjoyed himself, toward the end. We see him as an administrative King Midas, with everything he touches turning into a doomed tangle of red tape, debt and oomska. Do servants fear to touch his hand? How does he eat? How does he go to the toilet? Isn’t he nuts? Isn’t he hating it?

So yes, that is the assumption. When Stourton asked whether he was enjoying himself, Gordon gave a little laugh of forced brightness, chirruped something about challenges, and then started wittering on about Pakistan. It was depressing. He sounded head-in-the-sand-ostrich miserable. Tiberius miserable. Intervention-from-family-and-friends miserable. He sounded so miserable that he was unwilling to address the issue of enjoyment, or lack thereof, in any way.

Or that is how it seemed, initially. Others quickly identified a sort of intrinsic misery of essence, wheeling out helpful and abused terms like ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘manse’. Maybe, though, there is another explanation. Maybe, when Gordon Brown says, ‘I enjoy all the difficult issues and trying to make the best of it,’ this is exactly what he means. Maybe, when this man fails to insist clearly that he is enjoying himself, it isn’t because he isn’t.