WELL, YOU knew it was going to be fun watching Clare Short make a dork of herself on a reality show, but not this much fun. No, certainly not this much fun. Then again, nobody with this much self-regard, nobody so disastrously, vainly vulnerable to flattery that they make Malvolio look genetically immune to compliments, nobody so convinced that perhaps she alone has all the answers to the world’s economic and social ills, and who inhabits a moral plane so high that it would give mere mortals vertigo, nobody who is so able to screw their courage to the sticking place, and then unscrew it again ignominiously a few days later without feeling any shame, nobody with such qualities was going to emerge from a show like My Life in the Real World (BBC Two) with what was left of their credibility intact.

Yet your hunch is that Clare Short will have watched last night's broadcast and doubtless seen only confirmation of her human warmth and intellectual rigour, hugging herself at another triumph on the public stage, unable to recognise that her fellow teachers at the London comprehensive at which she volunteered to teach for a week thought that she had the same instinctive talent for teaching as a flatworm.

What would Short be teaching, anyway? Ventriloquism Part One? That’s the part where you learn to talk through clenched teeth while still moving your lips. Short herself never graduated to Part Two, the part where you learn to close your mouth, too, as you speak.

Actually Short was to teach geography, though obviously without heeding any advice from those who had years of experience in classrooms. No, Clare, despite her lack of experience, listened to the professionals and then announced: “I think I’ll just do it how I do it.”

“How I do it” turned out to be lamentably. She had no idea how to control children. She looked as if she may never have spoken more than two words to a child before. When a teacher offered to help her prepare a lesson, Short huffed that she couldn’t be bothered: since he knew all the facts already, why didn’t he just take the lesson himself instead? She arrived at school late because she couldn’t locate a hairdryer, not caring that other teachers had to be drafted in to cover for her.

Short’s first words to her pupils were, “You’ll have to help me, ’cos I don’t really know what I’m doing” (oh, if only she could be as frank in Parliament), even though teachers had warned her not to try to be the children’s pal, because it doesn’t work: Short knew better. Instead of reprimanding a child who was persistently late, Short praised him for not being quite as late as he was the previous day, ignoring her mentor’s warning that this sent a wrong, confusing message to the other pupils.

Short alone, you see, understands how humans work. Short — wouldn’t you just know it? — has a soft spot for humanity that these hardened, disciplinarian, uncompassionate teachers all lack.

Chaos in the classroom, the pitying scorn of her fellow teachers, her laziness, the triumph of her vanity over her responsibility to staffroom colleagues, nothing jolted Short’s preening confidence in her own abilities. Scientists searching for a new material from which to make the protective outer shield of spacecraft might consider plating Nasa rockets with Clare Short’s self-belief: it is evidently impregnable.

The world, or at least its pupils, has had a narrow escape. “My dad was a teacher,” Short told us. “One of my brothers is a teacher. My older sister is a teacher. I always meant to be a teacher.” Oh my. This is a woman who a year ago threatened to resign if UN backing wasn’t secured for the invasion of Iraq, but who then blessed Tony Blair and clung on to her seat in his Government anyway. Can you imagine what Short’s classrooms would have been like? A Lewis Carroll world. As a teacher she would be like Alice, convinced that saying what she meant was quite the same as meaning what she said. That’s usually good enough in politics, but it’s no help for passing CGSEs.

The wonderful thing about democracy is that it gives the people the freedom to vote into office anybody they want. What makes democracy so terrifying is the sort of politicians the people do want. If the thought hadn’t already struck you, then watching Clare Short in My Week in the Real World would leave you feeling truly disturbed that this woman has any influence — even as a humiliated, ridiculed backbencher — on the legislative complexion of this country. I guess that Clare Short will be taking that as a vote of confidence, then.

Short turns up in The Impressionable John Culshaw (ITV1) looking like Deputy Dawg and being flattered back into the Cabinet by Culshaw’s Tony Blair. Culshaw’s Simon Cowell is scarily like the original. Blair and Brown are played as testy neighbours who bicker over their garden fence in Downing Street. Robbie Williams has turned 30 and moved to Woking. There’s a Steve Irwin who manages to be more preposterous even than the real Aussie snake botherer; a smarmy Des Lynam; and a Ricky Gervais collecting yet another award.

A favourite? Probably Culshaw’s Trevor McDonald as MC McDonald, rapping the day’s news headlines. You might have thought McDonald was now almost beyond parody. But then you might have thought the same about Clare Short until her stint in the real world.

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