I APPEAR before you this morning a little down in the mouth. Quite literally – I’m a tooth down.

Immediately after completing last Friday’s column, I hobbled in my new shoes to the dentist for an extraction.

I lay in the chair, deeply anxious, my new soles on display to the world, my mouth wide open, the extraction forceps in place and sweat bursting from every pore of my head as I prayed for that moment of release when a little crunch reverberates through your skeleton as the tooth yields to the dentist’s pressure and relinquishes its grip on the jawbone.

As I waited, I realised the departing tooth had once been a political soothsayer that foretold Gordon Brown’s demise.

It has been chronically infected for more than a decade, a constant ribbon of pain running down my jaw. Every now and then, it flared up, but a quick bit of drillage and a prescription of antibiotics would knock it back. It was only really an issue when it flared up when I was abroad, and I have spent several Spanish holidays scouring back streets trying to score some amoxicillin.

Most memorably, it flared up in February 2010, the day before Prime Minister Brown held an awayday Cabinet meeting at Durham Johnston School. I was on crutches after my fifth football-related knee operation when the tooth exploded. Because of my difficulty with stairs, my Darlington dentist kindly opened a little used downstairs surgery, but I had to go in twice for two separate bouts of drillage before the pressure was released and I could hear my brain think.

Next day, I was allowed to interview the Prime Minister. I waited on the fawn leather back seat of his limousine, my crutches on either side of me and my tongue still seeking out the tender tooth.

Suddenly, the car door opened and, in a hubbub, the Prime Minister tumbled into the seat beside me, his body bulging like a sack of spuds. He put his head down to the car floor and in one majestic movement, swept himself backwards into his seat, propelling his hand through his hair to shape his parting.

Then, round-mouthed, he noticed me. He clocked my crutches. He may even have spotted my tongue.

“Oh,” he said, still round-mouthed.

“How are you?”

I felt I had to explain. “Thank-you for asking, Prime Minister. I’ve just had my fifth knee operation in ten years, hence the crutches, and yesterday I had to go to the dentist not once but twice for drillage to get rid of the pain,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, still round-mouthed.

“I hope we can help.”

This rather threw me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Andy Burnham, the health secretary, walking across the playground, and I wondered whether Mr Brown was going to call him over and get the tooth extracted there and then.

But he said no more. He had no more small talk left. Instead, he launched in a deep and knowledgeable discourse about the complexities of the Redcar steelworks crisis and the state of the regional economy, and when we reached Durham station, he fled from the car while it was still in motion.

The General Election was three months away, but I knew then that if he couldn’t empathise with someone who had had to go to the dentist twice in one day, he would struggle to make a human connection with the electorate. And so it proved.

Anyway, thank-you for asking, a week later, I’ve just stopped sweating. The pain was never as bad as I imagined, and the empty socket is healing nicely. I haven’t, though, managed to break in my new shoes. They still rub badly, but at least the dental nurse doesn’t know that my other pair has gaping holes in the soles.