WHEN you start a new job, you’re full of ideas about how you’re going to change things for the better.

It’s the same whether you’re a postman or Prime Minister. Take Gordon Brown, for example.

He dreamed of becoming PM for years, and schemed to attain the high office he thought was his destiny. In all those years as heir-inwaiting, I am sure he conjured up countless plans to carve out a piece of history.

I don’t suppose recording videos for You Tube ranked very highly among his priorities.

But that’s where he is, among the Britain’s Got Talent clips, performing pets and Elvis impersonators and all the other claptrap that clutters up cyberspace.

Nearly one million of us have tuned in to the Number Ten Channel and even Mr Brown’s bitterest enemies must feel sorry for the poor man squirming on the computer screen. He may be at home with endogenous growth theory and the principles of quantitative easing, but he isn’t a natural performer.

They’ll have me doing karaoke next, you can almost hear him saying to himself.

He’s on You Tube because suddenly we’re all interested in politics again.There are two main reasons for this. The first is the recession.

We are desperate to hear what the Government is doing to get us out of the hole that the bankers and our own bad habits have got us in. The second is the running sore of MPs’ expenses, a subject that has infuriated millions of people and made them question the motivation and morality of the people they elect to represent them.

By the time you read this, MPs will have decided whether to accept Mr Brown’s proposals to reform allowances and expenses. It is something he knows he has to put to bed if he has any chance to continue in his job after the next General Election. Yet, some in his own party will argue against it.

Some will do so because they believe his plans, particularly those for a daily allowance, are flawed. Others will do so because they want another leader. But some, I believe, will oppose them because they do very well out of the system and don’t want it to change. They don’t mind delay because, unlike Mr Brown, they are resigned to the fact that their number will be up in 2010.

These are people who dream and scheme to become MPs not because they want to change the world, but because they want the power, influence and material benefits that go with it. They’re professional, career politicians.

Every party has them, but Labour probably has more than most. They were attracted by its success, its power and win-atall- costs philosophy – not by its principles.

Principles, of course, are often annoying things, but it is amazing how much comfort you get from them in hard times – ask the countless, long-term Labour supporters who stuck by them in years of opposition, with no hope of power, preferment or material reward.

They are the ones who will, no doubt, stick by them in the lean years to come.

But without principles to unite them and their winning streak at an end, Labour’s lost generation seem ready to go their separate ways – no doubt to the boardrooms, directorships and consultancies that provide the consolation prizes of modern public service.

They can walk away from the wreckage.

They’ll leave behind a party that’s likely to have a long time to reflect on where it all went wrong. They’ll be a bit like us, as we discover that life doesn’t revolve around lowcost loans and rising house prices. It will be a hard lesson, but one which they – like us – thoroughly deserve.