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.