Find out if you are a psychopath with my quick and easy Gordon Brown sympathy test

I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but I feel desperately sorry for Gordon Brown. Not of course that I forgive him for having sold our old age for the betterment of his own big-government ambitions or cashing our gold for a handful of beans shortly before the biggest taxpayer bailout in modern history, again for the advancement of his and his friends’ political careers. For these things, and others, he deserves to be sent packing on polling day. But it would take a very hard heart not to feel a pang of empathy over Bigotgate.




I just know that slow, almost-unbelieving, sinking feeling he must have felt when he first heard he had been caught referring to sixty-five-year-old Gillian Duffy, a former Labour supporter who had button-holed him on the stump in Rochdale, when he thought he had been speaking to his staff off the record. Forget the rights and wrongs (critics will inevitably point out that by his actions Brown has shown himself unworthy of the support for which he is asking Gillian Duffy and millions like her up and down the country). I think you’d have to be devoid of all empathy ever to have experienced the sickening feeling of dread that accompanies the realisation that you’ve seriously and irrevocably put your foot in it and, seeing the same discomfort in a fellow being, remain unmoved. I’m sure everybody has their tale.


My own Gillian Duffy moment was of lesser consequence and it was a long time ago, but the heart-sinking memory of queasy self-consciousness remains as lucid as if it were yesterday. As an adolescent, I was larking around in Brentwood High Street with my friends after bunking off school, doing nothing worse than displaying the gormless ineptitude at which teenage boys excel. Cavorting around the place like an idiot, my friends and I were having a good old hoot at my court jester antics, when I suddenly felt the whole world freeze around me. Where only moments before there had been laughter, abruptly there was silence. Not only had my friends suddenly appeared rooted to the spot, staring at me, so too were other passers-by. In mid-cavort, I had taken the act just a nanosecond too far before realising jollity had inexplicably turned to widespread opprobrium, but it may as well have been a week, for the weight of silent public condemnation heaped upon me.


Baffled by the sudden seachange, I cast around for explanation. Looking behind me, I found it. Standing there, with a look of utter fury and outrage on his face, stood a boy, probably around the same age as me, with extreme Down’s Syndrome. I felt quite sick with the realisation that my actions had been taken as openly mocking him, there on the High Street, for the amusement of my friends and me. Hard on the heels of this awareness, the boy started shouting at me. My shame complete, strangers around me stared for a little longer before putting their heads down and swiftly moving away, perhaps themselves feeling slightly degraded by the episode. I wanted desperately to explain the situation, but the feeling of utter evisceration left me capable of little else than shambling off after my friends back to school. Not one of us spoke as we wandered back, strangers to each other in our own private worlds.


Looking at it dispassionately, one interesting aspect of the feeling of sinking doom with the realisation one has committed a world class gaffe is that it is virulently infectious. While obviously it is felt most acutely by the person at the epicentre, by dint of the human facility for empathy it can spread, virus-like, to those around them. So when I heard Brown’s remarks repeated on the radio yesterday, I might have laughed like a drain at the sheer banana-skin comedy of it, but I was wincing in sympathy as well.


At the paper where I used to work, an incident of adultery and regret was told and retold in the fine oral tradition of jounalists in the pub. At the time of the story, a secretary and a section editor, both married, had been conducting an affair which they wrongly supposed to have gone unsuspected by their colleagues; in fact, everyone knew about it, but all had been too discreet to mention it.


Most of the office had decamped to the pub for lunch, and after a couple of pints, the assembled found themselves in a state of uproar as each egged the others on in an infantile conversation about sex. Hack after hack attempted to raise a bigger laugh than the one before with ever more bawdy remarks, the growing volume of hilarity forcing each to raise their voice incrementally. Just as the uproar reached fever-pitch, the adulterous section editor howled at the top of his lungs, ‘YOU KNOW, I DON’T THINK WOMEN EVEN LIKE SEX!’


You could have heard a pin drop. Driven by an urge as primal as hunger itself and unrestrained by any conscious sense of delicacy, all eyes raced to the secretary, who dropped her head, face flushing the deepest magenta before wailing, ‘Oh it’s no good!’ and, weeping, fled the pub, closely pursued by her feckless beau.


The way the story is retold, those left behind stayed in the pub and had a jolly good laugh about it before returning to the office. But the editor, who had stayed at the office and was still there when they returned, tells a different story; that in fact the journos had returned in a highly sheepish state of apparent sobriety entirely at odds with the accompanying odour of alcohol, barely speaking and unable to make eye contact. This has the ring of truth about it. An almost identical story, writ-large, recounted to me by the woman at the centre of the indiscretion, demonstrates a similar suffering by those at the periphery.


The protagonist was at the time doing shift work at a bakery factory in west London. The bakery itself for the most part comprised a single shop floor spread across several hectares. Overlooking operations was a glass-sided manager’s office on the first floor, from which management oversaw operations and communicated with those below using an intercom tannoy system. My friend had not been working there for very long when she struck up a rapport with the manager, who was about the same age as her. This took the form of an apparently harmless flirtation, either on a face-to-face level when he walked onto the factory floor, or at a distance, as he spent much of his time in the glass-sided office above her work post. Reading between the lines, the (married) manager did not read any more into the situation than a bit of fun, whereas I think my (single) friend may have invested a little more in it.


This had been carrying on for some months before the unfortunate day in question when my friend and her workmates finished their shift in the middle of the day and, it being payday, decided to go to the local pub and make an afternoon of it. Not a little drink had been taken when my friend made the unwise decision to send a series of ‘playful’ (by which I mean quasi-pornographic) text messages to her manager’s mobile phone.


Little did she suspect that the manager had switched his phone off and set it to redirect all incoming messages and calls to the landline phone in the office. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a text message sent to a landline, but it is quite eerie: Thanks to some technical wizardry at the exchange, the message is read out using the recorded voice of a rather haughty-sounding woman speaking in the tones of received pronunciation popular during the 1950s. As it turned out, there was no-one in the office at the time and the haughty-sounding BBC announcer from 60 years ago relayed her series of steamy payloads to the answering machine.


Now under the circumstances, you might think it was lucky there was nobody in the office. Well, you’d be wrong. For a start, the answering machine was one of those with a speaker which plays the message as it is being left. Had someone been in the office, there is at least the chance that in a knee-jerk reaction of shame they might have switched the answering machine off. Or if no shame were forthcoming, at least they might have switched off the tannoy microphone, which had carelessly been left on. But no.

So it was that, over the next few hours, the workforce on the shop floor were intermittently regaled with the weirdly displaced, female voice of a very well-spoken dalek, claiming to be their colleague, going into nauseating detail regarding the different sexual positions she would like to attempt with their manager. According to my friend, far from the ribaldry and teasing one might expect after so comprehensive a faux pas, her next appearance at work was met with funereal silence, and stayed that way for some time after. Indeed it was several days before anyone would explain to her what had happened. The irony of it was that, after overcoming her initial embarrassment, my friend found herself able to laugh off the episode long before her colleagues were able to overcome their own mortification on her behalf.


In the Wikipedia entry on ‘empathy’, a research paper - Tunstall N., Fahy T. and McGuire P. in Guide to Neuroimaging in Psychiatry, Eds. Fu C. et al., Martin Dunitz: London 2003 – is quoted as saying that, ‘while some psychopaths can detect what others are feeling, they do not experience any reciprocal emotion or sympathy. However, some research indicates that components of neural circuits involved in empathy may also be dysfunctional in psychopathy’. So here’s what I think could be a pretty good test of whether you’re a psycho or not. Very simply, read this short facebook exchange, and see if it causes you any discomfort.


Yes, with all her youthful hubris and contempt for her employer, many would say the young woman deserved pretty much everything she got. But if you can tell me that you could not feel the slightest pang of empathy for the vertiginous sensation of jarring realisation she must have felt when she first read her boss’s comment, then I would respectfully suggest you put all the sharp things in your house far beyond reach. (For those who enjoy a good dose of schadenfreude, there is a similar story here.)


Such are people’s propensity for indiscretion in the digital domain, particularly – as with the woman at the bakery – if drink has been taken, Gmail has a special tool which can be calibrated to deny the user access to their email account if, after a few sherberts, they are likely to make an ass of themselves online. Personally, I think that if someone habitually does this to the extent they consider acquiring such prophylactic measures, there might lie a deeper problem which cannot be addressed with software, and they should perhaps consider drinking less. Whatever, I bet Brown dearly wished for some kind of automatic muzzling, and for this my heart goes out to him.


To those who want an end to Brown’s government, I would say that when it comes, in the words of Colonel Tim Collins, remember to be magnanimous in victory. Whatever ill you wish upon him can not be worse than the evils he will visit upon himself, after ignominiously crashing Labour’s longest-ever term of office into the dirt. As he lays awake at night, it will not be the real issues over which he lost the election – defence, education, the economy, that occupy his thoughts of ‘what if?’ – no, it will be the face of Gillian Duffy and the memory of the first time he heard himself call a lifelong Labour supporter a bigot on the radio, which will return to torment him.

The wisdom of Lamech no. 1

My 5 year old son claims to have made this joke up:

Q. What do you call a tree that grows hands?

A. A palm tree.

Does Silvio Berlusconi have more class than Gordon Brown?

You’d need a heart of flint to suggest that the recent announcement of Samantha Cameron’s pregnancy were nothing more than a Tory political ruse with which to win voters’ affections. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that family sentiment has served politicians well since it became acceptable to allow them to slobber over our children during election campaigns. That is just a nauseating fact of the modern polity we have to endure, (I bet no-one ever had to pass their kid over for a kiss from Disraeli or Gladstone), and in these post-Diana times there is regretfully little we can do about it.

What is not tolerable, however, is a politician’s use of public money for spending, purportedly in the nation’s interests, when it is to the betterment of a political party facing a serious challenge at the ballot box in a little over one month’s time. The editorial in this week’s Spectator takes issue with Gordon Brown’s use of the public purse, to the tune of £34 million in February alone, in funding ‘public service’ advertising on radio and public transport billboards, covering a bewildering array of government services aimed at helping us ‘lose weight, buy a car, claim more benefits, deal with door-to-door salesmen or stop smoking’.

Of course one might defend the funding of this campaign, extolling the virtues of big government, as comprising the cheapest way of communicating the availability of these public services to potential ‘customers’. However, this merely begs the question at issue, and does nothing to explain why such spending this year is 24% higher than the figure for February last year.

But what must be of greater concern was the top headline in the BBC radio news on Wednesday that the government has controversially awarded a £4 billion defence contract to build a light tank for the British Army in Afghanistan, to an American manufacturer, rather than BAE Systems, which may now have to shed up to 500 jobs.

On the face of it, this might not appear to lend any electoral benefit to Gordon Brown’s government. Why should anyone think the better of it for losing hundreds of British jobs during one of the worst recessions of modern times? But what is a far greater concern for Brown’s government, as it seeks to shore up public support before May, is the frequent, damaging criticisms concerning underequipped British soldiers (‘the borrowers’) since the invasion of Iraq seven years ago. These criticisms over underresourcing have become even more profuse over the campaign in Afghanistan in recent years – specifically over deaths which greater armour could have prevented - from all ranks in the army.

Labour must be sensitive to the effect the weekly drip-feed of news articles ending with the words ‘the relatives have been informed’ has on the collective subconscious. So one can see the logic in turning that on its head and putting the story of greater provision of armour to troops in Afghanistan on the news agenda. So the question is, would the country’s media have felt the same obligation to report Labour’s plans to better equip British troops in Afghanistan, had BAE Systems won the contract and those jobs remained intact? And the answer must be no, given Labour’s pledge in 2008 and 2009 to reflate the economy through ‘fiscal stimulus’ aimed at increased domestic productivity. It was the very loss of those jobs which made this a good news story for Gordon Brown.

There was a very good documentary about Silvio Berlusconi on BBC2 on Wednesday night. Now there’s a man who can ruthlessly exploit the media to his advantage. And, (despite the expenses farce and the ‘cab for hire’ nincompoopery of late), while no-one could say there is a single politician in Westminster who could better Berlusconi for corruption, links with organized crime, abuse of office and general howling-at-the-moon, prostitute-hiring vulgarity, at least he uses his own media channels for political advantage, and at least he pretends to use his own money for political advantage. Neither of which can be said to apply to Gordon Brown.

Enter my competition and win a vote in the 2010 British general election

Many years ago, I was berated by a friend for my plan to abstain from voting in a general election on the grounds that none of the political parties fielding candidates in my constituency held views similar to mine (perhaps of little surprise, given how little sway anarcho-syndicalism held in Tebbitt’s Essex of the 1980s).

My friend told me that if I did not exercise my vote, I had no right to complain about the actions of the elected government. The converse of which was, presumably, if I did vote for a party which represented none of my political views, I had every right to complain if a government formed by that party acted in a way I objected to, even if it were completely in keeping with its pre-election manifesto, which I had previously read, understood and disagreed with.

Well, Nick East, pick the bones out of this. The ‘give your vote’ campaign wants abstainers to donate their vote to those in other countries who have more of a view on British political life than the many jaded, underwhelmed ballot-casters which make up a good part of the British electorate.

The driving concept is that British citizens vote for British governments, which make decisions that affect many people in other parts of the world, who do not have a vote in Britain’s general elections. Which, considering the Iraqi military adventure debacle or the waste-dumping in West Africa super-injunction farce, seems a fair point to raise.

Egality, the activist group driving the campaign (and, I like to imagine, the bitter enemy of thinktanks Liberty and Fraternity), points out that there are many thousands of people who are entitled to vote in British elections who, for one reason or another, do not cast their vote.

Indeed, it is one of the ironies of the modern democratic system in Britain that the right to influence how we are ruled should be treated with as widespread indifference by the many, that the principle of universal franchise is routinely reduced to the diktat of the relative few who can be arsed to generate an opinion and go to a polling station to express it once every five years.

But here comes the crunch: Egality is urging us to give our unused votes to people in other countries – specifically Ghana, Afghanistan or Bangladesh – to use for their own political agenda.

Technology provides the means: Would-be abstainers sign up via the website, and receive a text message on polling day directing them who to vote for. Predictably, there are Twitter and Facebook elements.

(Actually, why leave it there? With the internet, the possibilities are endless: For example, what is there to prevent a vote-exchange system – the Multi-Coloured Swapshop of Suffrage, if you will – where a voter in, say, Sutton Coldfield swaps their May 2010 vote with a freedom-lover from California for a future Presidential contest, with comments moderated by Noel Edmonds? Or a ballot auction clearing house, (a new Ebay category of franchise, for example) where one can sell one’s vote to the highest bidder? Or indeed a combination of the two models, based along similar lines as the carbon credits offsetting scheme?)

When I first heard about the ‘give your vote’ campaign, on the radio in the kitchen, I cheered aloud for the sheer obtuseness of it. It’s not often you get this kind of high-browed imbecility. But when I came to set down exactly what I found so deplorable about it, I could not put my finger on one single reason. So many tried to muscle in at the same time, none could get through the front door.

Even now, after I’ve had a while to think about it, I cannot settle on one of the many reasons why one should object to the prospect of, for example, a Pashtun nationalist in downtown Kandahar casting a vote in, say, my south London constituency, where one of the most pressing political issues in recent months revolved around what should be done with a piece of graffiti (or is it art?) personally spraycanned by Banksy.

Indeed, I find myself in the bizarre position of wondering whether the ‘give your vote’ campaign is a perfectly reasonable idea, and it is merely my knee-jerk, mid-life reaction to it that prevents me from understanding this.

So here’s the deal. I will freely give my vote to the party of choice of the person who gives me the most salient argument as to why the ‘give your vote’ campaign is such an abhorrent betrayal of the principles of democracy, (or, if you’re feeling very persuasive and optimistic, why it is a good idea).

There are absolutely no restrictions and anyone may enter regardless of nationality, political belief or organisational affiliation/membership (although, obviously, I reserve the right to change this at any time, should it turn out I’ve crossed some constitutional line or another and the rozzers pitch up to sling me in the Tower).

The constituency is a former Liberal stronghold, which only held the Tories at bay by 1,000 votes or so last time. Given the neck-and-neck polls between Labour and Conservatives, this could turn out to be decisive.

Answers in the comments section please.