Charlie Brooker nails it:

If real life were a movie, instead of a cruel and horrifying string of random unfolding events, the mortifying slow-motion car crash that is Gordon Brown’s premiership would inspire pity in all but the most stone-hearted audience member. Assailed from all directions, stumbling, bumbling, droning, punch-drunk, hapless, hopeless, and aching with palpable misery, he increasingly resembles a depressed elephant, slowly being felled by a thousand pin-sized arrows fired into his hide by a million tiny natives, still somehow moving forward, trudging wearily toward its allotted graveyard-slot with morose resignation.

Here is a man apparently allergic to luck.

Brown’s extended drubbing has gone far beyond mere eeriness, and now teeters on the verge of harrowing spectacle – a protracted humiliation so total, so crushing, that merely witnessing it feels almost as terrible as being the man on its receiving end. It’s like someone’s dropped an indignity bomb directly on his head, and we’re all caught up in the blast.

Normally, to experience this sort of shared mutual shame, you would have to stumble unannounced into a room and unexpectedly catch someone doing something acutely embarrassing, such as masturbating or miming to Kaiser Chiefs in front of a mirror. Following 10 crushed eons of infinite silence, both parties would stare at the ground for a few moments, you’d mutter a dented apology about knocking first next time, inch your way backwards through the door as though quietly observing a religious ceremony, and spend the next half hour standing in the corridor cringing your skin inside out. From then on you’d share your painful-yet-private little circle of grief in silence, the pair of you implicitly understanding that The Incident Must Never Be Referred To Again.

That’s what would happen on a personal level. This is different. This is national. We’re all witnesses to The Incident. And I don’t know about you, but I’m finding the tension unbearable. I can’t wait for the general election – not because I want to see Prime Minister Wormface Cameron smugging his way into Downing Street, because I don’t – but just because I don’t think I can bear this mishap-strewn landscape a moment longer. It’s like being trapped in a hot room filled with an overpowering fart smell, waiting for someone outside to come along and open the window.

It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand…