As with Johnson, the media failed to understand what they were covering. His opponents in the press presented Livingstone as an  unreconstructed left-winger, and did not notice that when in office he was the City's poodle, who opposed Alastair Darling's modest plans to tax foreign financiers living in London. Meanwhile his admirers in the liberal press still think of "our Ken" as an iconoclastic challenger of the status quo, and avert their eyes from the darkness in him — perhaps because in some cases the same darkness resides in them. We are a long way from the bright, wired world, are we not?

Twitter, Facebook, celebrity game shows, e-petitions and Occupy the London Stock Exchange are not producing a more open breed of politicians, but allowing cunning charlatans to hide their true natures. You have only to look at the forthcoming London mayoral elections to see the new politics and its discontents. The men who play the game do not think its prizes worth winning. In his autobiography, a wistful Livingstone thinks of what might have been. He carefully records the names of everyone who said in the 1980s that he might be leader of the Labour Party one day, and — who knows? — prime minister as well. Being mayor of London was second best for him. Johnson feels the same. When he was at Oxford, he told his contemporaries that he would be in the Cabinet by the time he was 35. He's pushing 50 now and isn't even in the Commons.

As for the fickle viewers, I wonder if they will welcome the 2012 rerun of the "Boris 'n' Ken Show". Will they treat yesterday's celebrities as an exhilarating alternative to conventional politics? Or will they regard them as they now regard Big Brother: a reality TV format that once diverted the nation but now feels exhausted?