Recently, my friend Archie Davies was deep into writing an essay for his Oxford tutor on the subject of Gordon Brown and William Shakespeare. To judge by his mirthless scowl and the steam rising from his laptop, it was not going to be kind to the British prime minister, aka Hamlet, Iago or either of the Macbeths, though never Falstaff.

Nobody in the UK is kind to Mr Brown these days. His defenders are, or were, mostly American, such as Paul Krugman, the economic columnist who credited him with saving the world in the first stages of the global credit crisis, and Time Magazine, which ranked him among the planet’s 100 most influential leaders (alongside Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and her imitator Tina Fey).