Yakking for Argyll

The most fabulous political photo for yonks was in Tuesday’s Daily Mail (23rd September) - centre spread, pages 8 - 9. It was an unforgettable moment after David Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party Conference on Monday. Apparently dismissing his own ambitions, he’d conjured an adolescent crush on his leader’s achievements (abroad, not at home!) and then rushed to the hero seated at the back of the stage in unstoppable adoration.

The photo captures a bemused Gordon, smiling gently at all this unfamiliar exuberance while Millimetre gags for the camera like the Monkey King in a comic - all stretched skin, artificially wide-open ‘gosh’ eyes and the fakest smile you’ve ever seen. You have to see it. Find the paper. See the photo. Keep it. It’s a collector’s item. Would you vote for this? Would anyone vote for this? It’s not going to happen. Let’s hear it for the photographer.

In the legend, The Monkey King: ‘claims to be The King in defiance of the only authority over the heaven, the seas, the earth and the subterranean world … That act of high treason, coupled with complaints from the masters of the four seas and the Hell, incurs the relentless scourge of the heavenly army’. Hmmm…

Even more interestingly, after the profoundly unimpressive figure the boy-wonder cut in Manchester, Alan Johnston, recently rumoured to have agreed to be the Monkey’s running mate, seems now to be considering taking over the Organ Grinder’s role himself. Yesterday he was said to be denying any deal, with his friends quietly letting it be known that he had not after all ruled out standing for the leadership himself, should Fife’s own be toppled.

Great spectator sport. As Tristan Garel Jones once said after protracted EU negotiations under John Major: ‘imagine if this was serious’.