It's Not Just Gordon, They're All Political Obsessives

So Peter Mandelson calls Gordon Brown "a political obsessive" in explaining his manoeuvres over the euro. Peter! In terms of pots, kettles and indeed whole charcoal-coloured kitchens, just where do we start? We know what Mandelson was getting at: he was painting a picture of a nutty, grimly single-minded chancellor spending all his waking hours trying to outsmart Tony Blair, the guitar-strumming, "hello, clouds, hello sun" ordinary bloke of a prime minister.

But they are all three political obsessives. They just have different ways of trying to disguise the fact, because they know that the rest of us regard their obsession as odd. Blair spends almost every waking minute thinking about politics, from Northern Ireland through asylum to Africa. He talks rather more about time with "the kids" or playing tennis than he manages to do either of these things.

Brown makes a big to-do about watching football but that fools nobody: football is just the modern male politician's way of trying desperately to signal his normality. And anyway, such men either all go along to a match together - the political lads' afternoon out - or, if they're watching it on the box, there'll be a red box on the knee. As for Mandelson - well, he is out of the main game and walks dogs, and considers the property market, but he is also obsessed enough to be forever attending and organising conferences on Whither the Third Way?

And the three of them are completely normal inside their social group, which is the wider class, not of chatterers, but of political big-heads. All the frontbenches of all the parties; the anxious and ambitious backbenchers who want to join them; the still self-important ex-ministers who get airtime; the big-boy political correspondents and the newspaper and TV pundits; the leading thinktank bosses and spokes-folk; the pollsters and filmmakers. All of these people are at least a little bit odd. They are all caught up in the swirl and glamour of power, encouraged by the media from the Today programme every morning to Newsnight last thing before bed.

They read the political pages of the newspapers and the political columns first, checking bylines, looking for quotation marks and guessing, often correctly, who the anonymous "senior source" is. They have the political weeklies, Prospect and booklists from Politico's delivered. The really sad ones read Hansard and the House magazine. They know every restaurant and watering-hole in SW1 and they go to the same parties (this week, the bicentenary of the Press Gallery) and departmental drinks dos.

But along with the lifestyle comes a truly warped sense of self-importance. It is more than ministerial cars and deferential private secretaries - the easy targets. It is rather about everyone inhabiting, together, a privileged world. We matter, we know, we count: they watch, they're ignorant and they're even ceasing to vote. In this world, everyone works too hard, family relationships crack and normal life, where the shopping has to get done, and homes need to be cleaned and children brought up, recedes into the distance. It is true that some efforts have been made in the Commons to correct the trend. Robin Cook's reform of the hours was important because it acknowledged that the rest of life deserved some time and space; yet even here, with one small step forward, the obsessives are already fighting back. This week MPs were attacking the family-friendly hours as being bad for the Commons, and suggesting later sittings again. The complaints are all dressed up as concern that parliament isn't doing its job of scrutiny well enough, but we all know it's really about how to fill those long, lonely evenings. The obsessives need their fix.

But what is so wrong about that? Doesn't every profession have an obsessive elite which knows more about their own little world than is really good for them - the City types who spend heavily on wine and cigars and read the second section of the FT first, as they congregate in executive airport lounges; or the paid-up members of the sporting mafia, with their big red boy's cars and their Cheshire mansions? The difference, of course, is that politics is meant to be about the rest of the country. If the City is closed off and too many people make more money than is good for them, that's not good. But if politics is closed off, then democracy is dying, and that is even worse.

And I wouldn't want to give the impression that everyone in politics is a big-headed, cut-off, power-drunk obsessive. There are hundreds of perfectly decent constituency MPs who really are in touch with their local parties and, through their surgeries, many ordinary people with ordinary problems. In general, the poor bloody infantry of parliament do not get invited onto Newsnight, or out to lunch with journalists, or attend the round of inner-London dinner parties where hacks and political insiders trade the latest juicy gossip. They are rather looked down on by the real big-headers as rumpled, sad, irrelevant spear-carriers - mere provincial office-workers who have strayed to the edges of the big time by accident.

This is where the undermining of parliament really does count. It isn't only the family-unfriendly hours that are the problem; it is the much larger reshaping of politics in Britain, so that power and influence are held by a cluster of ministers (by no means all ministers), special advisers, political writers and editors and broadcasters. The Commons itself has become an irrelevant suburb, miles away from the real action, which is the noisy buzz round the prime minister and his friends.

It has a real effect on priorities. The decision by a press baron, Lord Black of the Telegraph, to mount a campaign for a referendum, at some stage, on the European Convention - which hasn't yet reported - comes to matter more, and gets more attention, than a dozen votes by mere legislators. The steamy details of the latest Blair-Brown spat get acres of newsprint and hundreds of hours of chattering analysis, while the country's real struggles over low wages, or clogged roads, or poor-quality food, are shoved to the bottom of the inside pages.

The big-head class, surrounded by grand gothic architecture and followed by the magnifying glass of media attention, is more interested in its own village gossip and the "form" for the next reshuffle than in the mainstream problems of contemporary Britain.

That's how it seems to me when, during part of my life, I am outside it, dealing with normal life and ordinary problems. It only takes a short time away from the electric lure of big-head politics to realise how unimportant and out of touch it really is. But, conversely, almost as soon as you set foot on the Westminster pavements again, back it comes: the excitement, the "what now?" buzz - and the radical distortion of human priorities it involves.

Peter Mandelson was right: Gordon Brown is a political obsessive, and it isn't healthy. But Peter Mandelson was wrong in suggesting, even for a second, that the chancellor is rare in this. Otherwise, what the hell was a man who had the chance to escape into the real world doing speaking over lunch, on or off the record, to a group of female lobby correspondents in the first place? Blair gave Mandelson the chance to get a life. It's time for him, and many more, to take it.