I didn’t watch Piers Morgan interview Gordon Brown last night. I had seen the clips, and the pre-briefing, and the rolling back from the ‘floods of tears’ at the beginning of the week to the ‘welling up’ on Thursday and decided that while I feel desperately sorry for the Brown family in many ways, it does not add anything to my understanding of him as Prime Minister to see him cry (or not).

I think we owe it to our politicians to accept that they are human like the rest of us. They feel pain, and loss, and happiness – and yes, hubris and over-confidence and pride as well. I don’t think we need to trot them out on camera every time they have a tough few weeks to cry on demand. Pity is a dangerous thing.

It’s a difficult line to draw though. Whatever our weird constitution says, we have ended up electing our Prime Minister. This election campaign is going to be Gordon Brown vs David Cameron. So at what stage do we say, no that’s private?

I think it’s right that we ask questions about what motivates our politicians, about what makes them tick. It goes to the heart of what sort of leader they are. Sometimes it can go too far – I really have no interest in forcing politicians to conduct every part of their private lives on TV.

But once again, this comes back to what kind of politicians we actually want. Do we want absolutely squeaky clean, dull, automatons with no understanding of humanity standing for election? I don’t. I want politicians who can acknowledge mistakes, who can empathise but not be overwhelmed, and who can fail or succeed like the rest of us.

The most important thing that politicians can give us is not their tears and emotion, but their judgement. And I don’t think that tears on demand are how they prove their fitness for office.

In 2006, an email with a very limited distribution list was leaked from inside CCHQ. It wasn’t a very important email and didn’t let out any big secrets so it wasn’t really the end of the world. But quite interesting nonetheless…

At the time, the BBC was showing  ’The Amazing Mrs Pritchard‘ which was about a complete political novice who had somehow ended up as Prime Minister (I seem to remember there was a great degree of disgust at the political classes… sound familiar?!), and she was a sort of common sense, get on with it, localist Prime Minister, who was worn down in office by great disillusionment and despair.

The email which was leaked went something like: ‘We’re looking for ideas to show how individuals, communities, and international actors can take different types of similar actions to make a contribution to the fight against climate change. For example, on Mrs Pritchard last night, she banned all cars for a day.’

I can’t quite remember what we ended up doing for this particular idea – I think it developed into the Climate Change Bill Now campaign (for which I still have a campaign tshirt).  But the important thing was this: there are actions which can be taken in varying degrees of commitment by anyone, no matter how small they are.

I was reminded of this by the huffing and puffing over the prospect of no cars being allowed into London in order to meet emissions regulations – reading about it, there wouldn’t be many days, and actually when I lived in Paris it was really nice not having cars everywhere on Sundays (lots of streets are closed to traffic).  Obviously there would need to be exemptions for some, and clearly it would mean that people would need to plan their time carefully to minimise their need to take the car. But I like the fact that Boris seems keen to investigate the idea.

I know that the person whose email was leaked was absolutely incensed by it (lack of trust, zero public interest, someone trying to make a name for themselves by having ‘insider’ information). But maybe it was a good thing after all – the very fact that people are now talking about the idea as a possibility shows that it wasn’t so crazy after all.

During David’s leadership campaign, the small group of us working on his campaign would gather together each time there was another milestone negotiated – the launch of the campaign, the Conference speech, the Newsnight interview, Question Time…

Thanks to the Coffeehouse (reminded by the interview with Jeremy Paxman in today’s Guardian), here is the Newsnight interview. 

The opening question and David’s response brought us all a fit of giggles and still more certainty that he was going to do this.

One of my least favourite Government Ministers (with Ed Balls coming a very distant last) is Dawn Primarolo.  I cannot abide her constant attempts to lecture people about how much and what they should eat; how much and whether they should drink and other various attempts to interfere into how people live their lives.  She is the embodiment of the puritanical and nannying nature of this Government – totally unprepared to trust people to make their own decisions over their own lives. Her puritanical brother in arms on television is Jamie Oliver and he is becoming increasingly infuriating.

His latest effort is ‘Oliver’s Ministry’, in which he travels to the North in a stunningly patronising attempt to convert the North to his ways of basil and guacamole.  It doesn’t seem to cross Oliver’s mind that the people he meets might not want to be lectured about how they should eat and how they should behave by this well meaning mockney.  I have no objection to people being provided with education about healthy living or healthy eating and making up their own minds about how to live their own lives.  What I do object to is a gross caricature of the North being used for the sake of “good television.”  I object to Jamie Oliver’s vaguely Victorian attempt to spread a new kind of morality and virtue under the new God of health fascism.

Doubtless, this new series will earn him a fortune in book sales and new advertising revenue in the South of England. However, I cannot see the man who single-handedly ruined Toploader’s career gaining any traction in the North of England.  He should remember that Sainsburys sales actually nosedived in the North and in Scotland when he started appearing in his toe curling adverts for the supermarket chain. Infact, he is more likely to find people from the North telling him where to stick his well meaning, patronising advice.