I've been spending a little time listening to I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue on the BBC IPlayer. I love that show. Partly I love it for the quick-witted (if groan-inducing) puns, but mostly I love it for the host, Humphrey Lyttelton, who died recently. A first-rate jazz musician and a very funny man, Humph's appeal came from the fact that he was, to all intents and purposes, a very nice, very well spoken old man who just happened to occasionally come out with terrifically rude double entendres. It helped that he seemed to treat the fact that he was a presenter on a radio panel-based comedy with something between dry scorn and outright distaste. What a guy.

So, I was listening to the show, laughing merrily away, and then they did a round based on George W Bush.

The show, it should be said, was originally broadcast in 2005, so the novelty of mocking ol' G W hadn't worn off yet. Humph would play part of a Bush speech and then stop it in an appropriate place, the challenge for the panellists being to continue the speech in as humourous a way as possible. The problem was that no matter how funny the panellists managed to be, the actual quote from George W himself managed, unfailingly, to be more absurd than anything they could come up with.

Something surprising happened to me during this round. I stopped laughing.

Perhaps it's the passage of that extra three years, but here in the cold light of the Space Year 2008 I feel wrong laughing at the fact that George W Bush can't tell the difference between the word "hostage" and the word "hostile". I feel bad about laughing at speeches where he claims to know, deep down, that "man and fish can coexist peacefully". These days I just reflect with genuine sadness that the most powerful man in Western politics is a monumental idiot, but it's more than that - it's the fact that the most powerful man in Western politics has been a monumental idiot for more than seven years.

George W leaves office in 2009. What kind of legacy will he leave behind him? I'd like to think that the best that any politician could aim for is that, when they retire, the world is a slightly better place for the changes they've made. Will George W Bush really be able to say that? I suspect that's a stupid question; of course he'll say it, regardless of whether it's true or not.

That's if he can pronounce it, of course.