Could somebody explain to me how it is Gordon Brown is currently asking us to accept the following three propositions simultaneously?

1. He has licensed his ‘aides’ to spend almost the whole summer putting it about that he is considering calling an autumn election (and as I have argued, this strategy has delivered for him in spades, in stitching up Cameron). The fact that an early election on the agenda at all is entirely down to him - and every time speculation has looked like tailing off, his team has stoked it up again.

2. Gordon Brown is a serious man with serious ideas, strongly focussed on “getting on with the job” of running the country, facing down terrorist threats, and not to be distracted from that by piffling petty party-political considerations such as what the most advantageous moment for an election might be.

3. Gordon Brown is a new ‘non-spinning’ leader, representing a change from the age of New Labour obsession with managing the media, as happened under Blair.

I can obviously see the advantage to him of trying to persuade us that these three at the same time - but why are the mainstream media and commentators buying that these three are compatible?

For sheer chutzpah you have to hand it to someone who can first (unattributably) put out a line, then attack those who are discussing that line, to try and burnish his own image, while simultaneously claiming that he is not interested in spin and all you get from him is the sheer unvarnished truth.

It’s very clever indeed. But then no-one ever thought Gordon Brown wasn’t that.

It is, however, possible to try to be too clever. For the moment he seems to be getting away with it great. But it’s a thin wire he’s treading up there which it will be very difficult to sustain. Very clever people are not always popular, and journalists are no more keen than the rest of us than the feeling that they’re being played games with.

To mix metaphors horribly, a gust of wind could start to bring some chickens home to roost in spades.