A Labour landslide will be terrible for the trusting Mr Brown

It was beyond a shadow of doubt an outstanding silly season, the best by far in recent years, with an excellent crop of stories. Leaving aside the daily tragedies in Iraq and Sudan, too heartbreaking to ponder for long without giving way to despair, August delivered some fine material: the emergence of the Notting Hill Tories, the amorous exploits of the Home Secretary and the arrest of Mark Thatcher.

Mark Thatcher, now urgently in need of a biographer, produced the best of these three diversions. Thatcher’s defining characteristic is a preposterously inflated estimation of his own intelligence and abilities. It is inconceivable that he could ever be the ‘Mr Big’ behind a mercenary coup, though entirely plausible that he should regard himself in such a light, once lulled by his arrogance and greed. Mark Thatcher is an archetype with many forebears in English literature, mainly comic: think of Dickens’s Steerforth or Evelyn Waugh’s Apthorpe. Ealing comedy, which delighted in villainous schemes gone wrong, contains a number of Mark Thatcher prototypes, sometimes played by Terry-Thomas. Thatcher’s education at Harrow School, the alma mater of so many impostors and villains, is another exquisite detail.

But the domestic landscape, as life begins in earnest once more, remains frustrating. Normally, with a general election looming, there would be bustle and excitement. Not so this time. MPs, strategists and newspaper editors agree that the contest is to all intents and purposes decided: Labour will win by another landslide. Westminster, like the stock market, has a tendency to discount forward. The political market is now peering beyond next year’s general election. This spells terrible danger for two figures in particular: Michael Howard and, curiously enough, Gordon Brown.