There are even reports from the PM’s plane to Japan that a young civil servant touted by Brown as his next speech-writer desperately doesn’t want the job and kept pretending to be asleep when the great man marched down the aisle towards him.

A group of London MPs who were called to the Cabinet room to meet Brown last week were mystified when – having told them that he wanted to tell them about his plans for dealing with knife crime – he came up with the idea of ‘midnight football’. He told them that youths in his own Scottish constituency enjoyed late night football, and it could be expanded in London.

“We asked him whether kids in his constituency really played football at midnight. He said they actually played between 8-10pm. It was really pretty odd,” said one MP who was there.

Won’t this interfere with the plan to curfew children? Perhaps the troubled families that get evicted can go live on the football pitches after they get back from visiting their stab victims at the local hospital. Pick a potty policy time…