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.