Brown is not the problem — it’s his thuggish henchmen who need to be reined in

It is now established in that nether world somewhere between the media myth-making machine and the public imagination that Gordon Brown is a brooding paranoid who cannot control his temper. John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants; Gordon Brown pushes secretaries out of chairs. Some stories stick to politicians not because people know they are true but because people want them to be true.

It no longer matters what the Downing Street spinners say in response to the claims of rough-housing in the Prime Minister’s bunker. Enough people from the inside have talked to journalists about Brown’s fits of anger for the Westminster village to know that Andrew Rawnsley’s book paints a picture of life around the Prime Minister that’s not a million miles from reality.

Is he a bully? Not exactly. As one former minister told me this week, ‘Yes, he is susceptible to rages. He is petulant and childish. But a bully, no. To be a bully you need to recognise that someone else is in the room.’ Gordon Brown, he said, lacked the human empathy to be a bully.

A close political ally who worked in No. 10 for several months said he had never once seen the Prime Minister humiliate a junior member of staff and that he only flew off the handle when he was angry at himself or his most trusted aides. This seems to be the agreed line, promoted most vigorously by John Prescott and Peter Mandelson.

Ever since Brown entered No. 10 Downing Street, we have been told that we needed to get to know the real Gordon Brown. Now we are asked to accept his tantrums as evidence of passion rather than abuse.

How has it come to this? Part of the answer is that the job of Prime Minister is a unique one.