On the day of June's European elections, a dapper older gentleman explained to a Newsnight reporter why he had recently switched from voting Labour to Conservative. "As soon as..." he drifted off, at a loss for words, and then exclaimed, "I loathe Gordon Brown." So much for the British art of understatement.

However improbably, out the other side of the worst election result for his party in 99 years, Brown is still Prime Minister, and this brooding bull of a man makes an irresistible character study for a novelist. Labour having polled a miserable 15 per cent in an election widely regarded as a litmus test of the Prime Minister's popularity — or lack thereof — his ungrateful electorate's "loathing" for their leader is not mere surmise but statistical fact. With an approval rating of 17 per cent, Gordon is more widely disliked than George W. Bush. But why? 

American presidential elections are often criticised for being personality contests, but political leadership is always about personality. That may sometimes prove a weakness for democracies, but observing an individual's strengths and failings writ large is also what keeps politics from becoming insufferably dull. If Gordon's problem is personality, it's not merely his charmlessness. John Major was pretty charmless, inspiring not antipathy but indifference. My quasi-Freudian theory about why Gordon pushes so many emotional buttons? He reminds the electorate collectively of Daddy.

We're not talking that humble, well-wishing sort of Dad, the supportive kind delighted to see his children exceed his own modest achievements. No, we're talking that fierce paterfamilias who clings to his role  well into his dotage, never acknowledging that his kids have grown up. The kind of high-handed Dad who engineers all manner of unpleasantness because it's really for the children's own good. Hence Gordon's scorn for an electorate that would turf him out of office given the chance.

Ironically, this ambitious archetype almost always suffers from chronic dissatisfaction. After scheming to become PM all his adult life, Gordon has rarely seemed to enjoy the office. Perhaps this impels him to cling to it, in the desperate expectation that being PM next week will finally provide some joy. The same psychology drives the obese to keep eating: surely it's the very fact that food has failed to gratify that makes overweight people continue to stuff down more of it.