A quick quiz. Did anybody honestly give Charlie Two Lunches a backward glance after his arse hit the pavement back in May (after you’d stopped punching the air obviously) much less pay any attention to what was left of his reputation?

Me neither. I have to confess, however, to musing vaguely on what a re-emergent Charles Clarke might look like after a suitable period of hermetic introspection. He did after all promise, in an interview with the Norwich Evening News after his sacking, to set about his neglected New Year Resolution to lose weight with renewed vigour. A svelte Safety Elephant sashaying into the sunshine would be a sight indeed.

The battle of the bulge doesn’t seem to be going too well if the opening footage of his fightback interview on Newsnight last night is anything to go by. He wobbled along on a ridiculous little yellow bicycle - to show or prove what and to impress who wasn’t explained - with a cycling helmet incongruousy and comedically perched on his head like a seashell atop a hot air balloon.

The indignity of it all (Clarke looked as if he hadn’t ridden a bike since his childhood, if at all) was hard to watch. If the BBC had made a chimp do it the animal rights lobby would have gone berserk. It was certainly a odd image to present in what is (his current media counter-attack, that is) ostensibly a face saving exercise as he combs the still smoking wreckage of his career to see if anything of any value has survived the inferno.

For this is what this wall-to-wall Clarkefest is all about. Having packed his trunk, he’s now packing heat. If it wasn’t about massaging his ego and trying to salvage his career then why gore John Reid and his (albeit nihilistic) attempt to clear up the mess left by Clarke and Blunkett? Why not keep your mouth shut or, alternatively, go and shovel some more chips into it? “John says I was a crap Home Secretary,” whines Charlie, shrilly, “Well, he’s pretty crap himself!” Isn’t New Labour in a bad enough state as it is - out of ideas, flapping and gaping like a landed fish, long years of opposition inexorably opening up before it like an elderly hippo being homed in on by a ravenous crocodile - without an embittered former minister childishly putting his vanity before his party while the rest of us all look on, grinning?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the spectacle. The public airing of wounded pride is always worth a I-don’t-know-where-to-look particularly from someone as monstrous and imperious as Clarke. He does a thwarted why-me sullenness in a way I haven’t seen since I last said my two year-old couldn’t have ice lolly. And imagining what the reaction might yet be from the thick-necked yet thin-skinned and similarly petulant Reid is the cherry on the top.

The thing is, we don’t need to be told that Reid is a crowd-pleasing, buck-passing, bandwagon-straddler (you also have to laugh at Clarke for accusing Reid of being a populist) especially by the humbled, punctured ego of a frustrated backbencher with an axe to grind. Anybody able to pick up a newspaper, from the liberal left to the libertarian right via the soft, creamy centre, is a miner’s canary able to give warning of the stink a Reid-led Home Office is cooking up.

In his attempt at securing redress Clarke brings no insight, no solutions and merely comes across as wishing to parade a grievance stoked by 54 days of second hand tales and newspaper headlines. Somebody get him a blog.