The Sketch: Savouring the grim humour of an Old Testament prophet

"I'm not sure the PM's quite well," I say.

"I'm not sure the PM's quite well," I say.

"Do you think it's serious?" Bob Marshall-Andrews says, hopefully.

"He's putting on weight quite rapidly, don't you think?"

Bob's spirits fall visibly. "People normally lose weight when they're really ill."

"It could be dropsy?" the cartoonist from The Times offers, to cheer up the candidate. It works. The vulpine grin returns. He's only partly joking.

Bob has a six-foot chicken on one side, a fox on the other and a dog behind him with a bandaged tail. It's been wounded somehow. They are political animals. That is, they are animal rights activists posing for photographs. Such is modern politics.

Bob spent the morning on a soapbox in the market, now it's the afternoon with activists. "At what point do you think animals should be given the vote, Bob?" he's asked while he beams for the activists' camera.

"When they're evolved enough to throw themselves under a monarch's horse!" he replies.

He's very quick; he's a QC, of course, so speed is expected. He looks like old Labour - not because he talks about poverty and human rights and civil liberties - but because he's the founder of the Old Testament Prophets who lunch on locusts at a Westminster restaurant. Brian Sedgemore was a fellow locust-eater and shared his feelings about New Labour's "descent into hell".

But Bob shakes his head: "One's first duty as a member of the Labour Party," he says, "is to stay in it." With power shifting to No 11, he probably feels the ascent to lefty heaven is about to begin. But what of the Chancellor's record? He didn't object to proposals to abolish jury trials and introduce control orders. Or indeed to anything that's made up "the worst record on civil liberties in a century", in his phrase.

The question gives Bob a moment's pause. "The soul of the Labour party is the alleviation of poverty," he says. "If Gordon Brown had resigned he would have lost his programme. People like me are certainly prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt."

We'll see. I dare say, soon enough.

"We are winning this election despite the Prime Minister," he says. "It's essential this becomes mainstream thinking and that we don't go back into government with a majority that endorses his position. The danger is that the more Iraq becomes an issue the more he will see himself vindicated."

But could Mr Blair construe it in those terms? "Of course he could. He is totally intellectual deceitful!" Bob draws breath. "Now, do you want to go off the record for what I really think?" He laughs. But it isn't a joke.

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