Cry me a win: Brown and Cameron

What can Nick Clegg dredge up? From now on, will the only viable party leader be the one who has personal tragedies to farm intensively as elections approach?

We’re not saying that Gordon Brown faked his tears for Piers Morgan in talking about the heartbreaking death of his and his wife’s first born child.

But, in agreeing to talk about the experience, he did effectively agree to cry. Tears in such memories would be unstoppable.

When Tony Blair paraded his children and had the princeling, Leo, sign a presentation photograph for President Chirac – ‘To Jacques from Leo’ (surely the most spectacular act of hubris in modern politics?) – Gordon Brown made much political capital from a vaunted insistence on retaining his personal privacy.

But that was then.

Now with defeat at the General Election in the frame… hey,  let’s remember Jennifer – in public. Let’s invite the world in to the most private and monumental moments of loss and grief imaginable.

In our book, anyone who would sell so large and incomprehensible an experience of the fundamental reality for a few cheap votes – and they will be cheap and they will make no difference anyway – is contemptible.

This, however, is not the end of the story.

Brown’s descent to the depths actually comes later tonight – but has been pimped all week to attract an audience.

But yesterday, in what must have been seen as a really neat flanking move, the Prime Minister was beaten to the red eye special by David Cameron, who faced the cameras to choke and hiccup over the death last year of his badly disabled son, Ivan.

What sort of Victorian circus of freaks have we bred? And are we really – in the 21st century – a guaranteed audience for these expediently reheated desperations?

Will we have spin doctors calibrating the finer points of impact on the voters sensibilities of, say, the death of a child at six hours as opposed to six years? Will cerebral palsy shade it over sickle cell anaemia?

Will we have Peter Snow shrieking around a weepometer on election night?

This is the gothic horror show the leaders of the nation’s two largest parties have unleashed.

If Nick Clegg chooses not to find a personal crisis to share, we could all vote Lib-Dem to get judgment and dignity back into political life.

But then – how could we be sure that his apparent restraint was not born simply of having nothing to sob about? He’d have to make sure we were told about it first – in order to be seen to be keeping it to himself. So debased has our politics become.

Either way, the big ponderable is why waste an asset?

And the final question is whether Gordon was prudent to spend all his children in one show? Should he have saved Fraser for another time?

This really is the nadir of British politics. It’s a world where such calculations are the stuff of daily business. Let’s not vote at all.