Rod Liddle: Gordon Brown has vanished. Why?

It may come as a grave surprise to you that, when it was offered as a prize in a charity auction, the opportunity to attend a dinner lecture by the former prime minister Gordon Brown failed to reach anywhere near the sum the organisers had expected. Particularly so as the prize promised, as a special treat, the chance to join Gordon for dessert. You would imagine there would be literally millions of people who’d jump at the chance to sit next to Mr Brown as he glowered over his ice cream, to which he had applied copious amounts of salt, totally silent except for the occasional sotto voce murmuring of ‘bigot!’ Or perhaps just sitting there with that terrifying mirthless smile he used to flash on and off at entirely random moments, like a faulty neon bulb in the deserted waiting room of a failed dentist.

But oddly, no. People were not queuing up. They were not prepared to fork out. The organisers estimated the value of this reward at £1,225, possibly more if Mr Brown, in one of those catatonic furies, actually assaulted you with the pepper pot. I don’t know where they got that figure from. Who can put a price on something like that? The second best prize at the auction was a video compilation of Douglas Alexander’s appearances on the BBC Question Time programme, with background music provided by the Lochaber Ladies Fife and Drum Band performing a selection of works by the late Karlheinz Stockhausen. Possibly, or maybe not. I’m just guessing there.

I read about the charity auction in the Times and the gist of the piece was that Gordon has somehow, sadly, slipped away from us. He is never to be seen, he has become a sort of non-person and all we have to console ourselves are those precious memories.