Now it is one of those iron­ies that on the few occa­sions you see the worlds of com­edy and news col­lide – the quiet, pens­ive people tend to be the comedi­ans, and the wise-cracking dis­pensers of bon­homie tend to be the journalists.

Armando Ian­nucci has been lay­ing into broad­cast journ­al­ism and its ‘shame­ful fail­ure’. He says it’s in thrall to tech­no­logy and doesn’t provide ‘nar­rat­ive’. I guess that’s what comedi­ans call a ‘story’. Accord­ing to Armando, com­edy has been left to fill the space left by news. The News Quiz, Have I Got News For You, The Daily Show, Mock The Week … they’re all there help­ing to inter­pret the world for young people.

Armando is indul­ging in a little mes­sen­ger shoot­ing. He blames TV news for fail­ing to pre­vent the Iraq war. I edited pro­grammes that day after day chal­lenged the thread­bare excuses put up the Prime Min­is­ter and his chums to con­vince the pub­lic that mil­it­ary action against Iraq might be jus­ti­fied. A few hun­dred thou­sand people even bothered to watch them. You could have got the same kind of thing on Chan­nel 4 News and even News­night. But although journ­al­ism can chal­lenge the exec­ut­ive, the audi­ence can’t influ­ence it. Ian­nucci shares the illu­sion that if only people could see through the stuff com­ing out of Gov­ern­ment they might some­how have…have what exactly? Taken to the streets?

When a mil­lion or so people marched against war on Iraq, the Gov­ern­ment poin­ted to the 59 mil­lion more who stayed at home. With no elec­tion loom­ing, the con­trol of the exec­ut­ive falls not on the elect­or­ate but on our elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives. The crush­ing fail­ure of the Con­ser­vat­ives to mount any kind of cri­tique of the Government’s present­a­tion of its case is their fail­ure, not journalism’s. The Lib­eral Demo­crats moun­ted an import­ant oppos­i­tion to the war but were led by a drunk who couldn’t be trus­ted to make his case on tele­vi­sion most of the time. That is their failure.

And when we did have a gen­eral elec­tion last year, Tony Blair man­aged a com­fort­able vic­tory. The father of a sol­dier killed in Iraq stood against the Prime Min­is­ter in his own con­stitu­ency and lost. The people have spoken. The bastards.

Com­edy is a reflec­tion of our power­less­ness. The fact that Have I Got News For You attracts so many MPs, reflects their power­less­ness too in the face of an exec­ut­ive that, since the 1980s, has over­powered our quaint Glad­sto­nian democracy.