Labour's 'message' is clear: give us your money

If there's any drawback to political schadenfreude I've yet to discover what it is, and while pessimism may not make you popular it sure as hell means you're likely to be right more often than those who, following Voltaire's Dr Pangloss, believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

So, we come to Gordon Brown, who, for years in advance of his ascent to the highest office in the land, I was stigmatising as the Anthony Eden de nos jours.

It didn't need much historical acumen to grasp the parallel, for, like Eden, Brown had spent the best years of his career waiting for a golden apple to fall into his generous lap, while lacking either the courage to fight for it, the guile to swipe it, or certainly the principle needed to say, 'Sod this for a game of soldiers', and walk away, hopefully together with a sizeable chunk of his party.

Westminster has been revealed as a snake pit inhabited by vicious anoraks

Instead, he hung on in there for Buggins's turn and has reaped the whirlwind. Still, if you think Brown is something of a pygmy after him comes a positive deluge of Munchkins. We've already seen David helmet-hair Miliband take a tilt at the top spot, then retreat, licking his wounds; now up comes Hazel 'Blair', erstwhile Communities Secretary as well as a dead ringer for Rod Hull's Emu.

Blears, after deleting her own glove-puppet videos from YouTube, has now pecked at the PM's miserable gurning-for-da-yoof over MPs' expenses. She has written of the need for Labour to have a relationship with the voters based on shared instincts and emotions. And offered up a mea culpa that's also a stiletto between her leader's wide shoulders: Labour ministers have a collective responsibility for the Government's lamentable failure to get our message across.

I've no idea what Blears thought she was up to with this grandstanding - she speedily tried to limit any damage that may have been inflicted on her career but inadvertently she has put her beak on most of the ills that afflict not just the Government, but the entire political class.

New media: the 24-hour news cycle, and the real-time dissection of the minutiae of politicians internecine conflicts have done for whatever remaining respect the electorate may have had for them: Westminster has been revealed as a snake pit inhabited by vicious anoraks. Knock on doors if you want to, Hazel, all you'll find out is that shared instincts and emotions of the electorate are revulsion at you and your kind, tinged with weariness and outright boredom.

Far from failing to get its message across, the Government has been only too successful for that message is: We care more about our sinecures, our expenses and our job prospects than we do about any matter of principle.

Back in the day most people with an interest took it for granted that politics was a cut-throat affair, but still understood that the blood-letting wasn't merely for personal gain; even the Thatcher cabinets, for all their savage ministerial infighting, still split over matters of conviction. There may have been no such thing as society, but there remained an argument to be had about what replaced it.

But since the Major years, the pragmatism of a politics decoupled from any real ideology, has shrivelled into a mere careerism; which brings us to 2009, and jockeying for power among opposing claques of ministers who make Swift's Lilliputian Big and Little Endians look like philosopher-kings.

Do you really give a toss if that Balls has ascendancy over this Brown, Smith or Harman let alone Blears? I think not. All long-serving governments end up with kitchen cabinets fighting over the leftovers of power just as all political careers end in failure.

Yet I can't remember a time when those leftovers have seemed quite so mouldy and inedible. Still, at least they provide a little sustenance - when Cameron and his hungry hordes get into office, they'll find even these scraps gone, and the cupboard altogether bare. ·