My point is merely that for politicians, or any other public figures, to respond to this in a substantial way is deadly. To place your emotional life at the service of good PR is coming close to selling your very identity.I don’t believe for a moment that most voters care whether Gordon Brown is going to marry Sarah Macaulay or not. The spouses and children of the famous become handy pegs for articles about education, clothing, holidays, health and furnishing. In return, it is assumed, the famous benefit from the reassuring glow of normality that such pieces confer. The Blairs have become almost a kind of alternative Royal Family for the mid-market press and mid-market television We know when they change their car We know which football teams their kids support. The Daily Mail, in relatively benign mood, follows the clothes and hairstyles of Cherie with almost as much fascination as it once followed Diana.These may be ominous echoes, but the press requires recognisable people to at as mannequins for lifestyle journalism.

It is partly that a man who will today be changing the incomes of so many families, possibly through mortgage tax relief and child benefit, has to seem as if he knows something about contemporary family budgets, and, therefore, about contemporary family life. He doesn’t want to be seen as the dour theoretician of Downing Street. He needs to be homely.Mr Brown’s neighbour in Downing Street shows how a politician’s family can be used positively by the media. Singles culture is celebrated by television and flattered by advertisers who know how to spot personal disposable income when they see it.Yet Brown’s image-makers seem to disagree.

And yet, as a country, we marry less and we marry for fewer years. If we were as family-based as we used to be, there would be no need for four million extra homes. Then came that strange remark about it being wrong to force anyone into marriage.It’s strange only because, these days, almost no one in this country is. One has in one’s mind’s eye a picture of burly Kirk elders dragging a frantically resisting Chancellor into a soot-grimed church on a hill in Fife. On the other hand, why should they let it all hang out? They aren’t trying to promote films or sell records.So they opted for being vague. Brown says that “marriage is important” and that “I’m sure I’ll do it one day”, making the whole business sound like passing a driving test. Rebutting that was the job of his press officer Charlie Whelan.

With characteristic gusto, Mr Whelan then seemed to make his dignified and reserved boss seem like some frantic serial shagger, the living embodiment of erogenous growth theory. Next came endless stories about Ms Macaulay and the imminence of her nuptials, spoilt only by Mr Brown’s habit of sloping off to watch football and his frank pleas for a little space and time. She, meanwhile, is in a hellish position, and handling it with extraordinary aplomb.Damned if they do, damned if they don’t? No pictures of Sarah Macaulay would presumably lead to “Sarah snubbed on Gordon’s big day”. The Chancellor was the object of a nasty whispering campaign about his sexuality. Here, after all, are real people with real emotional lives, posing for a pre-Budget photo-opportunity to celebrate the state of family – almost as if they were saying: “We aren’t married with a child. But, you never know, we might be; we are those sort of people.