Poor Gordon, plainly a victim of the Scottish play

It doesn’t help Brown either that in repose his face resembles that of a bank manager about to turn down a loan, while his smile has the ingratiating look of an undertaker gently steering a grieving widow towards his most expensive coffin.

He is at his best delivering speeches, which can sometimes resemble sermons – his father was a Presbyterian minister. But his interactions with the public are awkward. He just doesn’t do retail politics. And he struggles to hide it.

So, even before the microphone gave us the full insight into the Prime Minister’s opinion of pensioner Gillian Duffy, you didn’t need to be told he would rather be somewhere else.

Listening to Brown alternately patronise – “You’re a very good woman, you’ve served the community all your life” and lecture – “we’re raising the threshold at which people start paying tax as pensioners, but yes if you’ve got an occupational pension you may have to pay some tax but you may be eligible for the pension credit as well” – was painful.

He was even reduced to that old standby of a flailing game show host – “How many grandchildren do you have?”

Poor Gordon. It isn’t really his fault. In addition to handicap of his nation’s natural dourness, he is also awkward, ungainly and half-blind. 
But in private he is apparently even worse.

His angry surly outburst to his aide captured on microphone – “That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?” was a small taste of the private man.

According to a recent biography of the Brown, his Cabinet Secretary, “felt compelled to directly confront the Prime Minister and give him a stern ‘pep’ talk about his conduct towards the staff.”

His offences included screaming and swearing at them, manhandling an aide by the collar and shoving aside a secretary who wasn’t getting down his thoughts fast enough on her keyboard.

Apparently Brown’s staff is “afraid of him because he was always shouting at people, being unpleasant, constantly blaming people for things going wrong.”

I don’t know about you but that reminds me of someone a little closer to home.
Now to be fair to Kevin Rudd no one has ever accused him of manhandling his staff – or perhaps it would be more correct to say no one has accused him of manhandling his staff – yet.

But otherwise the - the tyrannical rages, the shouting and swearing at the help – all seem depressingly familiar from the descriptions we occasionally glimpse of the private Kevin Rudd.

What is interesting are the different responses of the public servants to their masters’ misbehaviour.

If Brown’s biographer is to be believed the head of the British Civil Service is still independent enough to tell his boss to pull his head in, whereas something tells me nobody in Canberra has yet had the courage to tell Rudd to improve his manners.

Some might argue there has always been a big gap between the way politicians’ public and private behaviour and the current interest in what goes on behind closed doors is merely an extension of the celebrity culture that intrudes into every corner of famous people’s lives.

Perhaps in the past people were just more forgiving of discrepancies between the public and private personas of politicians, just as domestic violence could be regarded as matter between a husband and wife.

Thus when Richard Nixon’s foul-mouthed tirades were revealed in the Watergate tapes it wasn’t his language that shocked but his crookedness.

Gordon and Kevin live in different times. Today we live in a world preoccupied with what a book recently called “The Authenticity Hoax”, that is the desire for the real, the genuine and the un-prepackaged.

In this world if you are a politician and you sell yourself as a bookish Christian policy wonk or a stern pillar of Scottish rectitude and the public get it into their heads that in private you are a ranting screaming bully, they are unlikely to be forgiving.