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A shadow minister was describing to me over coffee recently the nature of the "depressing" atmosphere at the House of Commons.
He said it was a combination of low morale after the battering over expenses and "paralysis" in Whitehall as civil servants close up shop in preparation for the general election.
Yesterday Gordon Brown declared the start of the campaign with a vote-seeking Queen's Speech.
The Government intends to present itself as paternalist and co-operative in contrast to the isolationist, laissez-faire Tories.
Meanwhile, the Tories claim that they may not support big government but they do have the big ideas.
Then there is the low politics. Alastair Campbell confided to a Left-leaning friend of mine that the strategy is simply to contrast Gordon Brown's reliable manliness with the unfamiliar and effete Tories.
The literary journalist Miriam Gross innocently helped the cause by writing a recent Spectator diary about the Prime Minister's gloomy attractiveness.
The image of Brown struggling with his failing eyesight to compose a letter to a soldier's mother will further bring out the Jane Eyre in female voters. Oh to feel Mr Rochester's bitten fingers outline the contours of one's face.
What we know is that the election campaign will be rough and personal.
We glimpsed this in Saturday's episode of the BBC's political satire The Thick of It.
I used to find this series merely entertaining but now hail it as a Swiftian masterpiece.
The goody-goody female minister Nicola Murray is ordered by spin doctor Malcolm to remove her daughter from her Sloaney school in favour of the grittier local comp. The daughter becomes a gang leader and is threatened with exclusion.
The stinging twist - far blacker even than David Hare's depiction of a female minister with a troublesome daughter in his play Gethsemane - is that Murray agrees to the sacking of the school's excellent headmaster in order to save herself.
Meanwhile, the civil servants in The Thick of It are oiling up to the potential new government just as Malcolm - whom Alastair Campbell denies is based on him - looks for a scorched- earth exit. "When the opposition are here, you tell them nothing except where the toilets are, and you lie about that," he sneers.
It is worth remembering when we hear about the big issues over the next months that it will also be a period of grids and matrixes and dark arts and wars of the infantry. Every weapon will be deployed. Black will be white.
Alastair Campbell dismisses The Thick of It as boring rubbish. What he means is that it is brilliantly authentic.
Belle's animal attraction
The unveiling of Belle de Jour has been a welcome surprise. My male acquaintances are cheered that she is actually quite fit, while advocates of higher tuition fees must be examining Dr Brooke Magnanti's economic model.
One of my churlish women friends seizes on the fact that Dr Magnanti is of American origin to claim that there is always one sexy, crazy, female Yank on the loose in literary society, causing mayhem. I will not quote her other examples.
What I found most moving was the testimony by Dr Magnanti's boyfriend that she really wanted to write about science and wildlife but could not find a publisher.
Thank heavens David Attenborough is not just starting out, or who knows what path he might have taken.
Strange denial for a superstar
Leona Lewis, the former X Factor winner, says she has no wish to be famous. "I definitely keep myself secret ... I went on a show watched by millions but I had no desire to be famous and still don't."
This is not exactly hypocrisy but a sign that Lewis has ascended to musical royalty. Famous and successful performers overlook the fact that they crawled over broken glass to get on TV and become disdainful about the vulgarity of attention-seeking.
In the same way, the very rich usually say that they are not driven by money and the socially elevated say it is not where you come from but who you are that matters. You know you have arrived when you have forgotten the discomfort of the journey.
A comfy chat can reveal all
The other evening I joined an invited audience to listen to the academic and writer Lisa Jardine in conversation with Stephen Fry about personal history.
In previous years the event was a lecture but everyone preferred the idea of a conversation, particularly with a brainbox such as Fry.
The beauty of a conversation is that it can take unexpected directions. It is also less aggressive for the subject than an interview.
The writer Cormac McCarthy agreed to talk to the Times recently on the condition that it was "a conversation" rather than "an interview".
As far as I could tell, the only difference was that the questions lacked punctuation. "You grew up Irish Catholic" may look like a conversational assertion but it is in fact a question about identity and belief.
Journalists will appear in any guise that will land them the scoop. From now on, I will no longer be requesting interviews with public figures but asking for "conversations".
