Brought to book - politicians and their fictional characters

GORDON Brown as Heathcliff? Well, if that's how our Prime Minister imagines himself, he's entitled to his delusions. Heathcliff is passionate, controlled, dangerously attractive to women. He goes to extremes for what he imagines is worth fighting for. He grows in moral stature throughout the course of Wuthering Heights. When Gordon Brown looks at himself in the mirror this morning, perhaps this is indeed what he sees.

Certainly, he must have thought, the comparison – or "an older, wiser Heathcliff" as he modified it in an interview this week – couldn't do him any harm. Women readers are ineluctably drawn towards Emily Bront's tortured hero. So perhaps women voters might be similarly wooed by the one politician who most resembles him?

But let's look a bit harder at the comparison. Heathcliff, as Bront imagined him, was a sullen, ungracious child. He has no known roots and his violent temper is alluded to throughout the novel. When his adopted father Mr Earnshaw dies, his son Hindley inherits the estate and treats Heathcliff as little more than a servant. His resentment grows – just as Gordon Brown's resentment of Tony Blair might have grown as he himself came into his political inheritance in 1997.

It gets worse. Heathcliff cynically swindles Hindley out of Wuthering Heights, cruelly abuses his wife and vindictively sets out to destroy not only his enemies but even their children. What's to like about any of that?

So if Gordon Brown's literary self-image is slightly out of kilter with reality, let's turn to literature to see if it offers any more accurate parallels – and not just with him, but with some other big beasts of the political jungle.

Fiction doesn't offer too many comparisons with prime ministers so far behind in the opinion polls: perhaps you really couldn't make that one up. But there are plenty examples of fictional characters brought low by spectacular business collapses – people like Augustus Melmotte in Trollope's The Way We Live Now. An outsider (check) and financial expert (check, sort of), he experiences great success (well …) but then – no, doom and suicide lie ahead. Scrap that.

Shakespeare's Corialanus, perhaps? A leader, certainly, but not particularly known for his people skills, whose attitude to the poor is even more contemptuous than scrapping 10p tax rates. But killed by conspirators, so better not give anyone ideas ahead of the October party conference.

So how about somebody who's actually a success? An outsider who outsmarts his rivals through sheer force of brain power, someone who was never quite accepted and always slightly looked down upon, but who ends up making the world safer at no small personal cost to himself?

One can already sense Gordon Brown nodding thoughtfully. Somebody like that would do nicely with the focus groups. The only problem is that the fictional character involved – John le Carr's George Smiley – isn't exactly photogenic or charismatic. He outshines Enderby, a rival of sorts and altogether more showy (remind you of anyone?) and has more success with the Russians than Brown managed with this week, but Smiley's "boring civil servant" image will hardly play well with the voters.

No, what Gordon Brown for his literary template is a truly heroic character. Step forward Pierre Bezukhov from Tolstoy's War and Peace. He's not as flashy as his friend Prince Andrei. Some members of the court even think he's awkward in society, that he's not what the "people person" we expect our politicians to be.

But Bezukhov is the man. He's a hero, though he doesn't look like one. He likes partying more than Gordon Brown does – he's even kicked out of St Petersburg society because of it – but perhaps Brown's wife Sarah can use her formidable PR skills to gloss over this social failing.

It would be worth it, and here's why. Firstly, War and Peace is an incomparably better book than Wuthering Heights: it takes on the world, not just overheated Gothic imagination and the windswept moors above Howarth.

Secondly, and more importantly, Pierre Bezukhov is far more heroic character. He cares about the fate of his people, thinks deeply about social and religious issues, he's an action hero (he almost shoots Napoleon, after all), learns from his mistakes and triumphs at the end. He even gets the girl – and even though by the time he does, Natasha Rostova is older and wiser, she's still beautiful. So that's Gordon Brown sorted. But what about the rest?

DAVID CAMERON

THERE'S no getting away from that picture of him at Oxford in full Bullingdon Club rig-out, no matter how much he wishes there was. So we'll start with Tom Brown, first among the not-so-equals of public school fiction. True, in Thomas Hughes's 1857 novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, he went to Rugby rather than Eton, but by the time of the follow-up he was indeed at Oxford.

The Bullingdon Club is, after all, just "The Famous Five" of Greyfriars School grown a bit older and more snooty. They might not have had Billy Bunter at their meetings, but they'd certainly have had Bob Cherry, Frank Nugent and Jamset Ram Singh along. But their leader, in Frank Richards's novels, was always Harry Wharton, so perhaps that's the literary figure David Cameron saw in the shaving mirror this morning.

Or is it? Maybe he's more like Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time: "A toady, spoilsport and sneak – the boy the school loves to hate but he grows to have heroic qualities as anarch, potential tyrant and lord of misrule."

No? Then back to Tom Brown again. Who was it who bullied him, "roasting" him in front of an open fire? Ah yes, that ultimate cad Harry Flashman. In George Macdonald Fraser's novels, there was never any ambiguity about Flashman's moral character – but he ended up with a knighthood and a VC. A success, in other words. And surely the Conservative Party leader would settle for that?

JOHN PRESCOTT

IN mangling English language of he the master of is, so comparison with Yoda made can be. Falstaff was probably handier in a fight (see Act II, Henry IV Part II), while still remaining popular with the punters, so that might be a better match.

Better still, though, is Oblix, the fat ("well covered"), menhir-tossing Gaul from the imaginations of artist Albert Uderzo and writer Ren Goscinny. Call him fat, though, and you risked getting punched.

ALEX SALMOND

THE temptation is to reach for Dickens's description of The Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist: "He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man." But everybody knows that Lewis Carroll got the SNP leader bang to rights in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The Cheshire Cat's grin is unmatched by any other politician in the land right now, but it also possesses another enviable attribute – the ability to vanish at will. Whether Alex Salmond will be grinning or vanishing after the Glasgow East result remains, of course, to be seen.