I generally try to stay clear of politics as should everyone interested in maintaining what little remains of their sanity. No wonder we were all happier back in the 1950's when politicians were people who were generally respected and sometimes admired and elections were a day off school for no apparent reason.

No longer. The modern addiction to images of politicians attempting to either con us or lie to us or simply avoiding anything that looks like a direct question or a member of the public has reduced the species to either scorn, hilarity, buffoonery or downright disbelief.

Take the currently unedifying spectacle of the Labour Party in the UK run by Tony (Teflon) Blair. Elected as the party of principle and prudence we now have the spectacle of the Deputy Prime Minister explaining, or rather very definitely not explaining, why he couldn't keep his trousers on with not one previous mistress coming forward but several. Already lampooned for his two Jaguars, for driving his wife two hundred yards to a Party Conference to protect her hairdo, this overweight, over inflated Lothario from the Land of Green Ginger has apparently been groping his way around the corridors of power for as long as any publicist can remember.

What is amazing of course, is that nobody had noticed! Famous for waving his Labour's Promise Card an punching the odd protester, this leviathon of the left has had his privacy protected by the press and whatever conspiracy currently protects such goings on until very recently. Shopped to the press by the builder boyfriend of his latest conquest he is now keeping a very low profile and presumably trying to explain the affair to his wife. What have we been told by the Government? That this is a private affair and not germane to the work of the said government. Well since the young lady whose sense of the ridiculous if not of morality must have been stretched to breaking point was herself a civil servant, paid for by us taxpayers, in fact the great man's diary secretary, we are left with the impression that once again the Great British Public has been well and truly screwed.

I shall pass over the fact that at the same time we discover our Home Secretary has been releasing legions of foreign murderers and rapist onto our streets, or that our dearly beloved Prime Minister has been apparently selling seats in the House of Lords, that august body which still in the British system votes on every Bill passed by Parliament.

The electorate of course will ignore all these scandalous goings-on and re-elect the Labour Party out of sheer desperation since the alternatives are even more apalling. Or perhaps it is because as a nation we are all completely addicted to TV Soap series and we just want to see what the next episode of Downing Street brings. Entertainment, not politics is our current addiction. For goodness sake bring back Clement Attlee.