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.