Oh dear, Tommy. Oh dear, oh dear. Some men are born stupid, some men achieve stupidity and some have it thrust upon them. Tommy Sheridan, erstwhile hero of the working classes, cannot lay claim to any of these alibis. He is a clever man who apparently has taken leave of his common senses. He has also mislaid that most precious and irreplaceable of commodities: his self-respect.
Oh dear, Tommy. Oh dear, oh dear. Some men are born stupid, some men achieve stupidity and some have it thrust upon them. Tommy Sheridan, erstwhile hero of the working classes, cannot lay claim to any of these alibis. He is a clever man who apparently has taken leave of his common senses. He has also mislaid that most precious and irreplaceable of commodities: his self-respect.
How else to explain the ludicrous decision to take part in Celebrity Big Brother, a tedium-inducing circus defying the Trades Description Act. As the barrel gets scraped ever nearer the bottom, the definition of "celebrity" is stretched ever thinner.
Of the current inmates, only Ulrika Jonsson could claim universal recognition; and that is more for her keepy-uppy sessions with erstwhile England boss, Sven Goran Eriksson, and the John Leslie affair than her own TV roles.
But Tommy? Once the silver-tongued darling of the anti-poll tax campaign. Once the MSP who famously took half his salary as an act of solidarity with the more modestly recompensed. A gallus performer with more than his share of charisma whose star has plummeted since losing his seat and winning a lurid court case against the News of the World on which the dust has far from settled.
His defence of this latest attempt to shred the remnants of his reputation - that he is a poor law student accepting an offer of honest employment while giving the credit-crunched citizenry a bit of a giggle, is the kind of riposte which gives disingenuity a bad name.
And I say so from sorrow, not spite, since Tommy has always been a hard man to dislike.
You might think he would have known better after the debacle of George Galloway's infamous feline impersonations on the same show. When the Bethnal Green and Bow ego landed in the house, even his most earnest detractors - no shortage there - couldn't have imagined the lengths to which he would go to demolish his political career.
Being a Respect MP and regaling the nation in a scarlet leotard could be considered mutually exclusive career choices.
Here, too, was a man of considerable gifts as operator and orator persuaded, perhaps by terminal vanity, that he could emerge from something as profoundly tacky as Big Brother with anything resembling dignity.
You think back to the storming performance he gave to a Senate select committee in Washington and again you mourn an intellect squandered on the twin altars of fiscal gain and cheap publicity.
Television is one arena where a lifetime's work can be incinerated in the course of a few ill-judged minutes, a truism exacerbated by the fact that the raison d'etre of shows such as Big Brother is to encourage confrontation and induce distress. People like Germaine Greer know this well, which is why she lambasted the format and the company behind it with her usual asperity before, bewilderingly, signing up herself. She lasted barely six days before checking out and labelling herself naive for having taken the Endemol shilling.
Now there are many adjectives people have sought to attach to the Australian professor over the years, but "naive" takes a bit of a stretch in the imagination department. This is the woman who famously declined to sign up for that other exercise in ritual humiliation - I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here - on the perfectly judged grounds that she didn't want to be trapped in the jungle having to "endure the twitterings of a bunch of has-beens and wannabees interested only in themselves and how they come across". Indeed.
So why join a cast so perfectly fitting that description when you have already crafted another TV persona eloquently discussing the arts and politics? Perhaps the common thread that binds a certain breed of people blessed with fine minds and poor judgment is an insatiable appetite for personal publicity.
It's certainly true that Greer, especially in her glam-rock days, took huge pleasure in trying to shock her adopted nation in a series of stunts not infrequently involving public display of private parts. Her CV is an extraordinary mix of fascinating books, academic attainments and serial thrill-seeking.
Meantime, nobody could accuse Gorgeous George of backing into the limelight; Galloway on tour wasn't just one man's raging against the darkness of the Iraq war, but endless opportunities to bask in public applause.
Now, of course, nobody can listen to him making an eloquent political point without, in their mind's eye, seeing a kneeling figure lapping imaginary milk from the cupped hands of faded TV star Rula Lenska.
I fear the perennially sun-tanned Mr Sheridan has set himself up for similar ridicule, even if his daily workouts lack a leotard.
Oh dear, Tommy. Oh dear, oh dear.
