Brown's is the new Black Dog

We learn of the Prime Minister's state of mental health in good time for the prolonged run up to the party conference season. And it's not an edifying national conversation.

The political class is merely a reflection of the environment in the same way our financiers and footballers are. A cursory glance at what the press deigns to publish into their behaviour as human being is a fearful record. In this we would see a world of deep, dark psychopathological symptoms running the whole gamut from city high flyers driven to infanticide to the captain of the South Africa bound England football team publicly urinating in lap-dancing joints.

But money, celebrity and power are involved and wielded. So in this case our common perception is that such people are successfully operating on a plane far beyond any ordinary level. And because of this fact we don't consider the immense anger, greed and stupidity exhibited when things don't go wrong.. We follow the money and the power because this is the true measure of success and failure in the reality that society has agreed.

That a politician of Gordon Brown's standing and experience should be suffering from profound depression is understandable. His own demeanour would have pre-disposed him to such suffering in any profession. But given a lifetime's heavy politicking, the incessant demands of the job, how could a post-holder not but exist in a state of perpetual jet lag and chronic circadian dysrhythmia?

Maybe in such cases it's best to be a dreamer. Last week on the Today programme there was a debate between Max Hastings and Dr Nigel Knight argued as to the effectiveness of Churchill as war leader.

Of course, but don't say it out loud, in time of war paranoid schizophrenia is nationalised. Having lived an inner fantasy life in which he saw himself as coming to the rescue of the nation, Churchill was well rehearsed for his final hour in 1940. And good thing too. What the time demanded was that England took action and fought, no matter what. The rational course then would have been a version of surrender and therefore lunacy.

In a famous essay psychologist Anthony Storr described the inner life of Churchill. In Storr’s view, “it is probable that England owed her survival in 1940 to this inner world of make-believe. The kind of inspiration with which Churchill sustained the nation is not based on judgment, but on an irrational conviction independent of factual reality. Only a man convinced that he had an heroic mission, who believed that, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, he could yet triumph, and who could identify himself with a nation's destiny could have conveyed his inspiration to others."

Orwell had it when he said: “In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

Maybe, for the time being, the nation has the Prime Minister it deserves?