Is Gordon Brown the most boring public speaker ever?

Of course he isn't. I don't normally sink to mentioning PR puff polls, but since reputable sources like Sky and the Guardian haven't have the good sense not to I suppose I'd better.

Here's the way PR polls work. You are a PR company, you want your client - let's call it Wizzytech Treacle - to get their name in the newspapers. Now, Wizzytech Treacle could pay lots of money to actually buy advertising space, but a much cheaper way is to commission a couple of questions on an Omnibus survey, asking the public which celebrity has the nicest bottom, whose head they would most prefer to transplant onto their spouse, who they would rather be trapped under a fallen wardrobe with, or whatever other rubbish appeals to newsdesks after a nice little story to fill a few inches.

Once they've got the silly result, they press release it saying "New research commissioned by Wizzytech Treacle shows Stephen Fry has the world's nicest bottom", possibly with a ready made quote from the CEO of Wizzytech Treacle extolling the merits of Stephen Fry's bottom. All the freebie newspapers who don't have the money for proper journalists happily copy and paste it into their newspapers and voila, plenty of Wizzytech Treacle column inches for a comparatively tiny outlay.

As one might imagine, questions done for this purpose don't necessarily have the highest research standards. In this context, it appears to have asked people who people thought was most boring out of a short list of people, including David Beckham, Kate Winslet and Chris Moyles. It doesn't show that Gordon Brown is the most boring speaker, it doesn't even show he is more boring than other politicians. It reveals the shock news that a politician is seen as more boring than a top footballer, a popular DJ or an oscar winning movie star. Hold the front page!