Why British politics will never make a good movie

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There is something wan and feeble about British politics on film. Not for the Brits the stench of corruption that permeated the Watergate affair, or the gift of a wonderfully bent White House politico such as Richard Nixon.

No. The best Britannia can come up with is elected members fiddling their expenses, liars like Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken, a murky restaurant-based arrangement that led to a fractious partnership between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and long-forgotten MPs engaging in tawdry toe-sucking rumpy-pumpy dressed in their favourite football strips.

Admittedly, British politicians do sex scandals rather well, though it's hardly the heady stuff that creates world-class drama in the mould of Mr Smith Goes to Washington, The Manchurian Candidate or Seven Days in May. Hollywood has the monopoly on that.

But let's talk about sex. Leader of the pack has to be Tory fall guy John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, who famously bedded good-time girl Christine Keeler in the early '60s and saw his career ruined because of it.

The film, Scandal, starring Ian McKellen as Profumo and Joanne Whalley as Keeler, is perhaps the best of its type. In fact, it's probably the only film of its type.

In truth, they're all at it, and have been for decades. Cecil Parkinson and Sara Keays. Paddy Ashdown and Patricia Howard. John Major and Edwina Currie. John Prescott and Tracy Temple. David Blunkett and Kimberly Fortier. The list is endless. What about the ones we don't know about yet?

Perhaps the episode best suited to a movie was the botched assassination attempt, in 1975, on Norman Scott, the man who claimed to have been the former homosexual lover of Jeremy Thorpe, the-then leader of the Liberal Party.

At the Old Bailey in 1979,Thorpe was charged with, and acquitted of, conspiracy to murder. Yet none of it comes remotely close to what JFK was up to in his Washington Camelot or at Hyannis Port. Even earlier, Warren Harding was entangled with Nan Britton in something resembling a large cupboard close to the Oval Office. Bill Clinton went one better: by enjoying the company of adoring intern Monica Lewinsky actually in the office of the President even though he "did not have sexual relations with that woman".

But surely politics is worthy of more than just sleaze. It should be about manipulation, Machiavellian intrigue and the low skulduggery that thrives in the corridors of Whitehall. Something else: it needs characters.

Where are the likes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher today?

Seventy years ago, on May 10, 1940, Churchill, aged 65, was appointed Prime Minister on the resignation of Neville Chamberlain.

A month later, on June 4, as the last of the British Expeditionary Force was being evacuated from Dunkirk, he gave a defiant speech in the Commons, vowing "we shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender".

Churchill was made for the movies. Who has that bulldog spirit today? Certainly not Brown, Cameron or Clegg. And what a sad state of affairs that is.

If someone did make a film, who'd bother to see it?