It’s hardly surprising that most politicians are mentally ill

I suppose it is largely our fault that most politicians are mentally ill. We eviscerate them daily and one assumes that some of the poison eventually seeps through and begins to affect their central nervous systems. Being held up to ridicule for their incompetences, being dependent for their livelihoods upon the whims of idiots, and being forced to speak in a language from which all real meaning has been excised obviously takes its toll. I have been reading the diaries of that strange former minister Edwina Currie — a woman with whom I share virtually no political conviction but who I have nonetheless always rather liked as a person. She is definitely mad. I don’t mean this in an unkindly manner; it’s just that to read her diaries is a little like being led into a place where orderlies in tunics remove your bootlaces and you have to ask for a nurse to light your cigarette.

She is not as fantastically barking as the people gathered around Tony Blair when he was prime minister, of course. Alastair Campbell’s vast tranche of diaries will fill you in on the detail of that narrenschiff, that bedlam, that nest of maniacs; all of them perpetually constipated, or manically depressed, or leaning over the khazi with their fingers down their throats — or just screaming at one another, day after day, wracked by paranoia and jealousy. Edwina’s madness is the more common one, that of self-delusion, the bizarre (to us) notion that she is right about everything and absolutely brilliant, like the elderly chap wired up to a drip in the boobyhatch who thinks he is the Duke of Wellington. At one point in Edwina’s book, wrapped up in some rage, she howls about how Margaret Thatcher kicked her out of the cabinet after the controversy over the alleged salmonella infection of eggs — something else Edwina got wrong.