Autistic, cold, inept, vengeful…. ever since Gordon Brown took the leadership of the Labour Party, and the Premiership he had long thought was his by right, the dour Scot has been the subject of one of the most sustained campaigns of invective ever seen. Neither personal nor political animus can readily explain it. Brown is by all accounts socially awkward, outside of a close clan, bad-tempered, suspicious and constantly plotting. In other words, he’s a professional politician, in a position of great strain.

Some of the animus came from the right-wing press earlier on, in the mistaken belief that he was significantly to the left of Tony Blair. Some of it came from the fact that he had made as many enemies on the way up as Blair had made followers, intoxicated by his charm. And some of it comes from frustration at his second-rate political maneouvring since Mr Tony left the stage. But above all, the curious hostility that attaches to Brown is because he’s wounded, a wounded animal, with the perpetual smell of death about him.

Part of that is his own fault, of course. Having been a fairly traditional socialist right up to the ’90s, his conversion to the idea that the engine of global capitalism could be harnessed to social ends was total, his identification with bankers and the city embarrassingly visible. The ostentation of it was aimed as much at internal battles within the Labour Party, as with getting business onside. Being left as the man holding the banker’s bill while Mr Tony skips off lightly away, makes him look forlorn and pathetic. Flabby and heavy set where Blair looks trim and young, Brown is the man men see in the mirror of a morning — and the man women see lying beside them. Blair’s the man they both want to see. He is the personification of all the disappointment attached to the recent, largely illusory years of boom in the West.

But Brown has darker and deeper waters than that, with a measure of damage that few who come to power in these sunny modern times have dealt with. Most well-known is the death of his first child at the age of a few days, and the cystic fibrosis of his second. Less well-known is the injury that lost him sight in one eye at age 18, a football injury that detached his retinas, the problem exacerbated by his Presbyterian decision to ignore the headaches that indicated the damage.

Saving even one eye involved Brown lying immobile in the darkened ward of a Scottish hospital for six months. For all but the most centred soul, such an experience would be challenging — for a teenager, it is a taste of the abyss, an early taste of the information best not got till later in life. Whatever that sort of passage gives you, the relentless optimism that Mr Tony gave off like a jacked-up radiator, ain’t it. People look into Brown and see the darkness he saw.

So it was always likely that allegations that Brown was not merely bad-tempered, but a “bully” would be widely believed. They surfaced weeks ago, with the pre-publicity for journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s new book about the Brown years, part of a process of slow doing-over by Blair loyalists — Tom Bower’s biography of Brown reads like a festschrift for Ted Bundy. The charge was that Brown’s volcanic temper went well beyond the normal lava flow typical of politics into something else, with aides being hit by flying objects, staffers on stress leave, the works.

The issue really hit the prints today, with the announcement by the head of the “National Bullying Helpline” that four members of Brown’s staff had contacted the line during their tenure in his office. It was a story that the Sun and other Murdoch papers were delighted to splash across their front pages — for one day at least happy to sound like a conference of youth workers , mid group-hug. It appeared to cut with the grain that Brown had been made out of. Even here, on the far away Aegean, the story was a subject of discussion, presumably because Brown reminds people either of a tragic hero, or one doomed by the Gods.

And then by midday, the story started to turn. For a start it didn’t add up. What sort of helpline breaks the confidentiality of its users to make a political point? How hard would it be to identify four advisers from the PM’s office? And what sort of toughened political chancers call a bullying helpline, of all things? Next it turned out that the bullying helpline wasn’t of the status of the Samaritans or Lifeline — it was a husband-and-wife outfit, connected to their HR firm that is most likely getting looked over with a fine-tooth comb now.

The fact that British politics can spend days swirling around bullies and bullying helplines says a lot about the political culture of the country. Bullying, like obesity and happiness, has become one of those obsessions through which the whole of British social life is currently viewed. The concern with bullying began as a focus on schoolyards, in the ’90s, most likely both the identification of a rise in the practice in a brutalised and individualistic society, and a pathologisation of all sorts of abrasive behaviour. From children it was rolled into the world of adults and the workplace in the early 2000s, where it fused with concerns about harassment and discrimination, to change the whole idea of adult life into consisting of little more than a set of medical categories. That it became applied to Brown and what would have been hitherto categorised as “being a sh-t” is a measure of the way that the categories New Labour put into play now feedback into politics. The whole country talks about itself like it was a clinic.

The sleaziness with which the bullying charge was martialled, especially by the Murdoch press, turned it into something of an own goal. There was something weird about complaining about bullying in a way that so, well, bullying — the gloating, grinning way in that the most thuggish media organisation in the world went on the attack had a Martian air about it. Having never taken the notion of bullying seriously as a criticism, the Murdoch press couldn’t tell when it sounded completely odd.

Peter Mandelson, Labour’s arch-fixer, looking more and more like John Hurt every day, went on the attack at an outfit that counted Tory MP Ann Widdicombe as its patron, and had a quote from David Cameron splashed across its advertising. By the end of the day Widdicombe had resigned and Cameron was furiously distancing himself.

The whole episode has pointed up what’s been steadily becoming apparent for some time — that Labour has some fight in it, borne as much of having nothing to lose except to throw in the kitchen sink, while the Tories are starting to look far less than the sum of their parts.

If only Gordon can keep the darkness at bay …