(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)

We were pretty sure that the last vestiges of this country’s dignity and standing in the world departed, like the friends and courtiers deserting Glenn Close at the end of ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, after the Blairs gave this mind-scorching interview to The Sun on the eve of the last General Election:

Cherie: Oh come on Tony, strip off. Let’s see that fit body we’ve been talking about.

Tony: You can keep your hands to yourself, Cherie!

The Sun: So how fit are you Tony?

Cherie: Very!

The Sun: What, at least five times a night?

Tony: At least, I can do it more depending on how I feel.

The Sun: Are you always up to it?

Cherie: He always is!

Tony: Right that’s enough - interview over…Come on woman, time to cook my dinner!

(We didn’t make this up. Honest.)

You wonder, fleetingly, if their drinks had been spiked. Just why the public didn’t go on a rampage of disgust like they have in Hungary this week, we never quite fathomed. Perhaps there was something good on the telly that night.

There was obviously a high-level meeting held where it was decided that Tony telling a tabloid newspaper how many times he fucks his missus was compatible with the gravitas and statesmanship needed to deal with, say, the Middle Eastern crisis. Tony, it seems, will never be caught in the race for the bottom.

Or so we thought.

Cue Gordon Brown giving unprecedented access to Sky News’ Kay Burley last week for the ‘A Day With…’ feature (watch it here). In amongst such puffery as Gordon’s self-deluding insistence that the American-designed, Brazilian-engined and German-owned new style Mini is a ‘British icon’ and Burley’s hackneyed Alan Partridgesque metaphors (sitting in a car and saying ‘up until a couple of weeks ago the Chancellor would have thought he was very much in the driving seat’) was the money shot. The trump card. The final proof that Brown is much more than just the mouth-breathing miserablist he’s portrayed himself as for the first 55 years of his life.

He spoke ‘movingly’ about his daughter Jennifer who died at just ten days old in 2002. Fortunately the train carriage the interview was conducted on was empty so nobody could overhear the Chancellor baring his soul to the nation.

Brooding, moody, driven Gordon, who before now has showed barely a flicker of emotion beyond stilted small talk at photo opportunities, has finally opened up. Or rather, he’s got desperate now that his chances of sitting in the Big Chair might be receding. We’re expected to believe that it’s coincidence Gordon decided to break his silence now despite hardly uttering a word on the subject in the last four years.

‘Project Gordon’, as the remodelling of the Chancellor as a fun kind of guy at ease with himself has come to be known, has so far been a failure. The hacking off of that greasy quiff, the whitening of those brown gravestone teeth, the whoring of his national pride by claiming his favourite footballing moment is Paul Gascoigne scoring against Scotland at Euro 96, his twisting to the Arctic Monkeys, have all failed to establish Brown in the public consciousness as someone you’d want to have a pint with. Time to play the Dead Kid card.

Maybe he wasn’t primed beforehand that the question of his bereavement would come up. Maybe he was ambushed. Maybe he could have refused to answer a question on the most private of matters, refused to play the game. Maybe the temptation to finally let the great unwashed into his heart and him into theirs proved too much.

Give the Blairs their due. They might have protested too much about their sex life like a frustrated middle-aged couple on holiday after too many sangrias, but beyond a few well chosen photo opportunities they’ve never exploited their kids. And they didn’t, to cite another example, as you might have expected them to, take the advantage of public sympathies after Cherie’s miscarriage in 2002. In fact, as far as we can find out, neither of them ever said anything significant on the record about it.

(Tony did, it has to be said, exploit a dead kid once. In 1993, he claimed the corpse of Jamie Bulger saying the two year-old’s murder was ‘the ugly manifestation of a society that is becoming unworthy of the name’ and kicked off the law and order fetish that to this day imagines the country as a set-in-Britain remake of ‘Escape From New York’.)

Now, contrary to what you might think, we don’t have hearts of stone here at The Friday Thing even if they are beginning to fossilise. The death of a child, it goes without saying, is just about the most harrowing, painful ordeal a person can experience. Many parents have channelled that grief into what they see as good causes - the mothers of murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne (by a paedophile) and murdered teacher Jane Longhurst (by a man who’d accessed violent internet porn) being the most recent examples.

Put aside your feelings about whether people who have suffered such terrible grief are the best people to be advocating or consulting on new laws. Forget for a minute that Megan’s Law, the US law allowing parents to know if there is a paedophile living nearby and rechristened ‘Sarah’s Law’ in the push to establish it over here, has led to vigilante justice and the ostracising of the innocent in America. Forget that outlawing violent porn veers close to legislation against ‘thought crimes’, and it’s debatable, as we’ve said before, whether such images create murderers rather than merely fuel them.

The Longhurst and Payne campaigns were born out of a determination to prevent such horrors happening to others; out of an underlying altruism. To salvage something, however small, from the wreckage. Brown, on the other hand, despite vague allusions in the interview to the charity set up in his daughter’s name, is using his grief as part of his job application.

This is in no way to suggest that Brown’s grief is anything but sincere. It’s just its belated expression fuels the hardening suspicion that there’s nothing he won’t do to realise his hitherto thwarted aspirations. You also wish he’d be this honest in all his dealings with the public. Yet another example of his chicanery hit the news this week when it was revealed he’s been lying about public sector debt figures (that is, we’re in bigger shit than he’s admitting).

That said, we didn’t read a word of criticism of the Chancellor’s lachrymosity in the papers. The Daily Record went as far as to describe Brown’s potential to be - brace yourselves - ‘The People’s PM’. The people, after all, love an ostentatiously public display of grief whether it be for Diana, George Best or the Queen Mum. We’re on our knees praying that Richard Hammond pulls through as the country currently stares down the barrel of an Irwinesque outpouring of grief and - the state of the nation being what it is - a televised funeral. All for some bloke who drives fast cars for a living.

You never know, Brown’s use of his grief as capital, as *a resource* to be exploited, might work. You have to wonder though where he goes from here if his tactic fails to summon a big enough wave of sympathy that he can surf to the Prime Ministership. Popping out his glass eye and dropping it in Blair’s water glass at a press conference, perhaps?

Nah. Too dignified.