And it’s no good looking to politicians to give a lead, because only last month blokeish MPs forced through a partial return to late-night sittings so they can spend their evenings at Westminster instead of – God forbid! – going to the theatre or spending time with family and friends. A pigeon? Maybe it was a dead pigeon, not a robin, that I had to worry about. Do they have robins in the Bronx or Sicily? Check the internet No threatening emails Only the usual ones about enlarging my penis. How do they know? They must have a camera somewhere in the house Rip out the electrical sockets That’s where they always put them Must get rid of clothes now Right, I’m naked and there aren’t any more sockets. Smash the telly, Sky is watching me, Rupert Murdoch sitting in his penthouse in Kookaburra watching a naked me smashing my mobile phone You’ll never get me alive I could live here without seeing anyone for years.

They wouldn’t be expecting that, they want me on the streets I’ve got a plan, lucky me.. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer went to Africa in his chinos last month, he was not the first Gordon to come a cropper. He avoided the fate of General Gordon, whose head was paraded on a pike after the fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi rebellion in 1885. But it may have been the beginning of the end of his ambition to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister

This was not the conventional view at the time.

What was striking was how prime ministerial he looked, how comfortable on the world stage and how engaged with the human dimension of poverty on the poorest continent. But if Brown eventually joins the long and distinguished list of claimants to be the best prime minister the Labour Party never had, we may look back to this period as the time when his tide began to recede. This is not primarily because the Americans rejected his plans for a new form of aid funding at yesterday’s London meeting of finance ministers from the rich countries. The cynic might regard a bust-up with the Bush administration as helpful to his designs on the leadership, but that is surely too cynical.

Progress on African development is one of the British Government’s two priorities for this year, in which it holds the chair at meetings of the G8 club of rich nations And if the Americans don’t play, then there is no progress. What does seem cynical is the competition between Blair and Brown to be seen as the prime mover of Africa policy. Blair’s authentic demand, that “I, personally, should be associated with it”, from a private memo on crime policy in 2000, rings through the years, as he and Brown try to be photographed with Nelson Mandela, Bob Geldof, Bono and crowds of African children. And if Brown’s plan stays smouldering on the ground, we can be sure that Blair will be as far away from the wreckage as possible.
But that is politics. There is something to be said for the argument put to me by one cabinet minister, who described the Blair-Brown relationship as one of “creative” tension and said that they were at least trying to outdo each other in pushing towards a worthy objective.The danger to Brown is that, by going to Africa and by trying to compete for the limelight of global compassion, he has made it easier for Blair to move him after the election.