Matthew Norman: Ming the Miraculous, holder of a new record

To set a national record at one sport is a marvellous thing, but to set two in entirely unrelated events is utterly amazing. So today let us salute Sir Walter Menzies Campbell QC MP, and herald him not as "Ming the Merciless" (no one who could put up with Charlie Kennedy's nonsense for years deserves that label) but as "Ming the Miraculous".

In 1964, this Olympic sprinter ran the 100 metres in 10.2 seconds, establishing a British record that survived until 1967. On Wednesday, it took Sir Ming a little less than that - the unverified time is put at 9.93 seconds of Commons hilarity - to run his acting leadership of the Liberal Democrats into the buffers of raucous ridicule.

Consider that William Hague took months before treating the Notting Hill Carnival to his baseball cap, and you must suspect that this is one record that will last even longer than Bob Beaman's long jump in the altitude of Mexico City. Indeed, it's barely possible to conceive how it could ever be broken.

On his first public outing as Lib Dem temporary guv'nor, to recap briefly, the bookie's favourite for the job rose to his feet at Prime Minister's Questions. Imagine the cocktail of elation and nerviness sending the adrenalin racing through his veins. For ages he has craved the job and made no bones about it, admitting to spending ten minutes a day regretting not going for it when Paddy Pantsdown went off to rescue Bosnia in 1999.

Since then, Sir Ming has recovered from the lymphatic cancer which for a while seemed likely to kill him, and established himself as possibly the most fluent television performer in front line politics.

All in all, then, it seems safe to assume that he rose to his feet shortly after noon on Wednesday with the ill-suppressed excitement of a man close to realising a lovingly nurtured ambition. The first of his two questions passed without incident. The second did not. Why, he wondered, "do one of five schools not have a permanent head when ...", and that simple "when" was the starting gun for an explosion of cackling from which he may struggle to redeem himself.

Now, to you and me and anyone else we may regard as vaguely normal, the irony implicit in the question - that the Lib Dems themselves lack a permanent leader - might be worthy, at most, of a hint of a flicker of a ghost of a wintry smile. Members of the Commons are by no means normal, of course, and their sense of humour tends towards the simplistic end of the playground bully spectrum. The late Lord Stratford's likening of Mr Hague to a foetus was celebrated there, for instance, as an aperçu for which Dorothy Parker would have murdered Mark Twain.

The thing about group comedy, much like all comedy only more so, is that it's entirely about perception. The fact that something isn't very funny is irrelevant if members of the group osmotically convince one another that the only honourable response is to cede control of bodily functions by way of tribute. The recent mass hysteria about Little Britain, a patchy show with a few golden nuggets gleaming through the dross, confirms this.

So does the post-war public's relish for the work of Arthur Askey. Isolate members of a 1957 Palladium audience and ask them what it was about a man buzzing like a bee ("buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzzzzzz") and mispronouncing the word "thank" as "thang" which left them close to paralysis, and they'd probably mutter something about the need to have been there at the time.

There is, then, no point whatever in Sir Ming railing against the unfairness of his fate, especially since he could so easily have avoided it. All it wanted was a knowing preamble to his absent heads question - something like "Now as you'll appreciate, Mr Speaker, this is an issue dear to the hearts of my Right Hon friends at the minute, but would the PM explain why ..."

If he'd taken that pre-emptive route, so easily amused an audience would have roared with and not at him. William Hill would have cut his odds, the sketchwriters would have lauded him for adding self-parody to his arsenal of forensic weapons, and the grins on the faces of Messrs Oaten and Hughes would have been brave rather than joyous. Instead, the poor chap was obliged to stand there grinning bravely himself, feeling the rivulets of molten sweat gliding down his back, wishing he could sprint for the exit.

In truth, it could have been worse. However humiliating unwanted laughter may be for the public orator, stunned quietude is more so. I still blush at the memory of the1990s Tory conference at which a hungover and unprepared Jerry Hayes, then a deputy party chairman, shuffled on to the podium to begin a speech: "Mister Madam Chairman". From this zenith of Ciceronian splendour, the descent was vertical until he piteously murmured, "This isn't going very well. is it?"

More recently, of course, in what I sincerely hope won't prove the template for Sir Ming, David Davis learnt the unique horror of being received in embarrassed silence. Anything, even being heckled by the ultras of the Women's Institute movement, must be less painful than a nightmare expressed on Shooting Stars by a truly terrible Vic Reeves joke being met with wind whistling through the graveyard and the echo of a distant church bell.

At least being laughed at offers some kind of escape route, however dangerous. In Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, in what may be the funniest passage of writing in the English language, Jim Dixon ends his drunken lecture on Merrie Englande by pretending to faint. This not being much of a precedent for any would be successor to Mr Kennedy, Sir Ming contented himself with an innocuous remark about knowing it was going to be that kind of day.

That it should have been that kind of day, on that day of all days, was a murderous stroke of ill luck for so comparatively likable and impressive a politician. I sincerely hope, as I say, that he doesn't pay the full price. No one is better placed to deal with a resurgent Conservative Party, and keep the Lib Dems in a three-party game, than the dependable, rightward-leaning Sir Ming. In a weak field, he is immeasurably the strongest candidate.

Given the general irrelevance of what takes place in Parliament these days, he may get away with it in a vote of party members. Yet there are moments that brand public figures indelibly, and the image of a doddery old boy reduced to parliamentary laughing stock in less than the time it takes to soft boil an egg is one from which he could struggle to recover. How miserably ironic, if it should prove fatal, that the sprinter who played the tortoise with such discipline and for so long should finally have imploded like the hare.