The political conference season, with its cod-revolutionary policy launches and poorly scripted fightbacks, brings to mind John Cleese’s famous line in the film Clockwise: ‘It’s not the despair… I can take the despair. It’s the hope.’ Like all great comedians, Cleese is at heart the eternal pessimist. In a recent interview he declared that he used to think that by mocking the follies of the world he could make people see sense, but now realised nothing ever changed. In their own ways, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Caroline Lucas and so on stand in opposition to that world-weary take on life.