Poor Tony. One minute it's Jags and BMWs, next it's a Vauxhall

Watching the gloriously embarrassing moment of Tony Blair arriving at his constituency and trying to get into a top of the range BMW before being directed to a shoddy Vauxhall, reminded me of how brutally public the transfer of power is in the British system. In the States, you are President for life but here, your car gets nicked the moment you say "the end".

Harold Macmillan told Michael Cockerell that, having resigned the premiership from his hospital bed, he discovered a workman in his hospital room removing his telephone as he wasn't "entitled to it anymore". At the same time as Blair was getting his first lesson in ordinary mortal existence, Brown, having arrived at the palace in a red Vauxhall came out to find a gleaming black Jaguar - don't get too used to it, Gordon.

It's such a shame that the cabinet reshuffle happened in the Commons and not in the glare of the Downing Street cameras like the good old days. Back then, it was always obvious who had been sacked - they might turn up in their ministerial car but, if they were for the chop, it disappeared the moment they went in. This meant that both the driver and the assembled press knew that said minister had been given the boot before he or she did.

Brown's more private reshuffle puts paid to a top wheeze that I've had planned for 15 years. Whenever I pitch anything vaguely satirical or political I always bring it up as an example of what kind of "stunt" I was going to do. Sadly, I never got round to it.

It's very simple - on the day of a reshuffle, every MP, however rubbish, waits for the call from No 10 asking them to come over and see the Prime Minister as he wants to give them a job in government. No matter how unlikely this might be, the ego of an MP doesn't allow them to totally reject the possibility of such a call and this left them vulnerable to my cunning plan.

I used to work in Westminster and while I was there I collected a vast amount of useful information, including the phone numbers of most MPs. My plan, while a reshuffle was under way, was to get a bunch of friends to help me ring about 100 MPs, pretending to be a No 10 lackey and ask them to come and see the Prime Minister at 2pm. The joy would have been to see 100 MPs turning up at the same time only to be forced to take the walk of shame past the cameras.

Big political moments are always fun for the prankster. I remember when John Major resigned as Tory leader and challenged all comers to take him on. There was a week-long media circus on College Green. I took full advantage of all the live news broadcasts to get into the background with various weird stunts. One of these was a band of Mexicans who were supposed to be Michael Portillo's distant cousins come over to encourage him to run for the leadership. We had a lot of fun getting into every shot and brandishing pointless placards saying things such as: "Portillo, you my Tortilla."

The news corporations got very angry and, the following day, we turned up for another session of camera hogging to find that they had built a huge stage on scaffolding that lifted them a good 10ft off the ground.

Not to be defeated I rang an acrobatic school and got 10 students down to the green. We dressed them up as Mexicans and they then formed a human pyramid that got the top three bang in the background of the shot. It was a total triumph.

Then there was the time that, dressed as teddy bears, we kidnapped the Tory chicken... Politics was a lot more fun back then. It needs a bit of spice put back into it. Now, what was David Miliband's phone number?

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