On Sunday 2 September 1990 Melvyn Bragg finally confirmed he’d permanently lost the plot by devoting a South Bank Show Special to George Michael in celebration of the release the next day of Yog’s second solo album Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.

Nearly two decades on, that album is remarkable mainly for its mediocrity. The singles tanked – in turn reaching numbers 6, 23, 28, 31 and 45 in the UK, in no small part thanks to Precious’s oh-so-artistic decision not to appear in his own videos – after which Bubble promptly lobbed his toys from his pram where his record company was concerned, all but retiring from the studio for six years until Virgin bought out his deal with Sony.

The best tracks on the album remain a Stevie Wonder cover (They Won’t Go When I Go) and a single with an annoyingly-infectious chorus that performed much better on the charts when Robbie Williams covered it six years later (Freedom ’90).

For much of the album Michael bangs on about the awful state of the world and, in particular, just how unbelievably horrific it is to be a multi-millionaire, multi-award winning singer and songwriter with never-ending access to all the drugs and groupies you can eat.

The sentiment is about as easy for the average punter to swallow as was Bono whining a couple of years earlier about how he Still Hadn’t Found What He Was Looking For. (Perhaps the diminutive Dubliner simply couldn’t see it hidden behind all those enormous piles of his cash.)

Yog won’t even let that particular bone go on the album’s closing track, Waiting (Reprise). The difference here, however, is that this slowed-down, stripped-back version of the album’s torpid third single, Waiting For The Day, contains the best lyric and most soulful vocal of Michael’s career.

It being the one track from the album remaining on my My Top Rated playlist, Waiting (Reprise) has always held something of a fascination for me, echoing as it does an interview I read with ABC’s Martin Fry from around the same time saying that even on the night he celebrated The Lexicon Of Love album reaching number one he felt empty, realising that his ultimate musical achievement was leaving him hopelessly unfulfilled.

(It came as little surprise that Bubble chose Waiting (Reprise) to open his recent 25 Live tour; it not only builds to a crescendo of “Here I am!”, but that final note is still comfortably within Michael’s increasingly limited range.)

The feeling when listening to Michael soulfully crying Waiting (Reprise) is that the singer genuinely doesn’t know the answer to the artfully-constructed, if self-pitying, question: “You look for your dreams in Heaven, but what the Hell are you supposed to do when they come true?”

Having achieved everything he thought he wanted and everything he strove for years to attain, it made him fucking miserable. A story old as time – having been awarded the ultimate prize, the prizewinner simply didn’t know what to do with it.

George’s answer was to smoke so much weed that he became a Flowerpot Man. While I can certainly see the attractions of that, it’s not a route I can necessarily condone for today’s equivalent, the Right Honourable James Gordon Brown MP.

It took the poor miserablist 14 years from election as a Member of Parliament to enter government. It then took a further decade before he could make the short walk from 11 Downing Street to the neighbouring abode. While he was – broadly speaking – a solid enough Chancellor, he never even tried to hide just how badly he wanted the Premiership or how little he felt Tony Blair deserved the crown.

Rightly or wrongly (and I never saw too much evidence to substantiate the claim) Brown was perceived as all gravitas and sincerity to Blair’s Chancerite philosophy of smiling vacuously and talking bollocks like a Hughie Green for the 90s. The feeling was that after Brown had done Waiting For That Day, he would herald a new dawn, a serious antidote to the complete and utter fluff of the Blair era.

As he finally stood outside Number 10 in June 2007, the nation wanted to believe that it was going to get its credibility back. As we had in May 1997, so we demonstrated – at first – a willingness to believe that things were now, finally, going to get better. I, too, was prepared to go with the flow.

The shit sandwich he has served up to the British population since late September 2007 has been a rude awakening for us all. But at least he found time to pay tribute to Jade Goody, eh?

As Arrivederci would have known if he’d listened to Waiting (Reprise) more attentively, “There ain’t no point in moving on until you’ve got somewhere to go.” Yet, remarkably, the man who had been so consumed for so long with the pursuit of the Prime Ministerial office seems never to have thought about what he would do with the power once he got it.

Blown this way and that by the vicissitudes of life the poor wretch has lurched from crisis to crisis, attempting to patch up his administration with populist utterance after knee-jerk initiative. Nobody is fooled anymore – he just isn’t up to the job.

(Not, I should add in all fairness, that there is anybody else in either of the two main parties that inspire anything remotely approaching confidence that they could do appreciably better, with the sole possible exception of professional Tory leadership election loser Kenneth Clarke.)

The man who claimed he went into politics to help the poor is the man who as Chancellor and Prime Minister has overseen a situation whereby people earning as little as £6,400 a year now pay income tax. The minimum wage is £5.73 an hour: you therefore only have to work for 21 hours a week at minimum wage to pay income tax. More than two millions of Britain’s poorest taxpayers face marginal tax rates in excess of 60%, a situation that will only become worse when VAT shoots up to 20%, as it surely now must at the end of this year. Keir Hardie’s fairly glowing with pride.

While the introduction of the 50% income tax band on the highest-earning 1% of the population is welcome and grabs some easy headlines, it does nothing for those most in need and raises (in terms of the stratospheric debt mountain we must now scale as a nation) sod all in revenue.

The man who built his reputation as a fiscal colossus on three pillars – deregulated wholesale financial services markets; open-to-all consumer finance; and a domestic property bubble – now oversees a financial services sector in tatters, with neither banks lending nor individuals borrowing, and a ruined housing market which still has far further to fall than the 20% already lost over the past year.

The ever-reliable Vince Cable was right this week to point out that it’s more than a little sickening to see Brown and Darling shoring up the same mortgage-backed securities that got us into this mess with public money that doesn’t exist, legitimising bribery to try to get consumers to buy foreign cars, and hiring the same former investment bankers who fucked us all over to try to convince foreign lenders to buy the country’s debt – particularly when the administration still clings to discredited white elephants such as the ID card scheme, the nationwide NHS IT project, a replacement for Trident, and so on.

We couldn’t afford follies like these before the ship hit the iceberg: there is now no excuse at all for Captain Darling having stood up (albeit briefly – Wednesday’s was the second shortest Budget speech since 1945: precisely the sort of leadership we need when everything’s going to so swimmingly…) and failing to kick them firmly into touch.

Today’s Bloomberg pen portrait of the Downfall-like scene apparently playing out behind that black, shiny door in SW1 is heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure. There’s no doubt in my mind that Arrivederci is a fundamentally decent enough bloke who has been dealt a bum hand – the staplers, computer printers and mobile phones he’s launching around Downing Street are simply a manifestation of the frustration that must be steadily eating through his soul. But it’s not good enough.

George’s last, most heartfelt question in Waiting (Reprise) is: “is it too late to try again?”

Sadly, Gordon, it’s now much too late for anything but goodbyes and – to Labour’s eternal shame – another decade of Tory government.