If one consorts with pickpockets, crooks and thieves, one can hardly complain if one subsequently discovers one’s pocket watch, wallet, credibility and integrity have all been lifted.

If you befriend, cosy up to and patronise Chancers who later turn out to be as toxic as the debt in which they dealt, you deserve everything you get by way of collateral damage to your reputation.

There is no sympathy here for Arrivederci, the man who is in rapid danger of succeeding Lee Majors as The Fall Guy.

This week should be Posh Boy Dave’s vision of Heaven.

Where normal men dream of a week filled with an Access All Areas pass to a couple of grammes of coke, a crate of JD and the US women’s gymnastics team, PBD prays for day after miserable day of news of economic decay and financial ruination for thousands of families up and down the land, secure in the knowledge that all he has to do in order to inherit a landslide at the next election is sit there quietly like a good boy and make sure he doesn’t get papped emerging from the Garrick with Bernie Madoff.

Wacky Jacqui’s been caught with her fingers in the till; Jeremy Clarkson’s doing all the name-calling for him; unemployment’s heading north; Clegg’s getting what for about his haircut; the Bank of England’s running around screaming, “Doomed, doomed, we’re all doomed!” at the top its lungs; the dog whistle politics of “British Debt For British Taxpayers” is rightly biting Gordo on the arse; Ed Balls, of all people, has gone native; even The Harry Potter Bugle is repeatedly kicking Cabinet members in the nads.

When things are this bad for a Government – and 2009 is shaping up to be as bad for Labour as 1981 was for That Bloody Woman; if there’s a hot spell this summer, they’ll be back out on the streets of Toxteth, Brixton, Handsworth and St Paul’s, not to mention Kensington & Chelsea, Hemel Hemspstead and Alderley Edge – the Opposition doesn’t even have to offer up any policies or plans.

This week simply couldn’t be going any better for PBD.

So what does he do?  He gets involved in pantomime exchanges across the despatch box about the age of a Renaissance artist when he died 450 years ago and his mates doctor Wikipedia to support his argument.

While seeking at every turn to undermine the credibility of Arrivederci and Captain Darling (something at which they’ve proven amply adroit without his help), PBD – like the PR hack he actually is – has a little army of helpers graffiti-ing corners of t’Internet to big up their boy.

It’s a tiny story – it won’t get a minute on the Six or Ten.  But it sums up everything about the rancid cunts who are even closer to the Crosbyites than Arrivederci was and who are now so close to power that they are standing proud in anticipation.

PBD says, “Ooh, sorry.  Naughty me.  Let’s move on.”

But PBD won’t let other politicians do the same thing.

PBD says it’s time to do away with Punch and Judy politics and stop the spin that’s fatally undermined the credibility of politicians in the eyes of generations of voters.

Some might say PBD’s a clueless, hypocritical little turd who a half-effective Prime Minister could kick around the chamber of the Commons for sport.

The rest of us simply despair.

Coming all too soon…