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Why is anyone fooled by the smile of this slick operator?

As past leaders have found, Richard Branson hasn't made his billions by putting his country first

In Screw It, Let's Do It, a recently published distillation of his personal philosophy, Richard Branson confides that he was not always the irrepressible figure we see today. It was Freddie Laker who told the shy entrepreneur back in 1984: 'Get out there and use yourself.' Today, Branson's faith in this strategy remains unfaltering. Only last week, capitalism's answer to Norma Desmond presented himself for a relentless succession of close-ups, heedless, it seems, of the possibility that some members of the audience might be ready for something a bit different. 'There are lots of brands with multigenerational appeal,' he insists, in Screw It, Let's Do It. Or as Miss Desmond tells us in Sunset Boulevard: 'The stars are ageless, aren't they?'

In Branson's case, certainly, even his most idiotic, most nakedly attention-seeking stunts can still find an enthusiastic and, as he says, multigenerational audience. A few days ago, Newsround, the BBC's current affairs offering for under-12s, led - 'First look at tourist spaceship' - with a story about Branson's Virgin Galactic business, which intends to sell joyrides in space on the democratic principle of 'making private space travel available to everyone'. Which, even if palpably untrue ('everyone' can't pay £100,000 for a ticket), is clearly a more upbeat story than, say, Peter Hain letting himself down or Ken Livingstone being nasty to a black man for the sake of multiculturalism. Particularly when you think how many of those experimenting with this extremely risky form of travel are likely to be hedge fund managers. Alas, this method of firing them, six at a time, into the indifferent void appears to be very much at the concept stage. Newsround reported that: 'The billionaire behind it, Sir Richard Branson, said test flights would start later this year and trips could start in 2010.'

In an arresting example of government-sponsored synchronicity, this news item about a billionaire's plan to enhance his brand by association with a scheme only a child would fail to identify as wilfully pointless and wasteful emerged just days after reports about the same billionaire's official trip to China and India, where he was accompanied by the Prime Minister. Which in turn came in the midst of more stories about the same billionaire's consortium of hedge fund and private equity interests being a favoured bidder, under the Virgin name, for Northern Rock. In the words of Screw It, Let's Do It: 'As far as I am concerned, anything, however outlandish, that generates media coverage reinforces my image as a risk-taker who challenges the establishment.'

As attractive as this brand-building may be to Newsround, it remains hard to understand its appeal to Gordon Brown, an exceptionally prudent person who actually is the establishment. Perhaps, like Morecambe and Wise, or Jekyll and Hyde, these two very different characters have somehow found a way of reconciling their differences, with Brown's principled refusal to enjoy his job complementing Branson's dogged emphasis on his partying side.

As a break from his gruelling work for the environment, for instance ('My new goal in life is to work at reducing carbon emissions'), the air travel magnate likes to recharge his batteries on the Caribbean island of Necker, which is for rent, incidentally, and easily reached if you pick up a connecting flight at Antigua or Puerto Rico.

But even if there is a case for Brown adding grinning to his ever-expanding repertoire of happy expressions, it would be worrying if the men became too close. While there may be no harm in Gordon Brown learning how to crossdress, or to invert women so as to see their underwear, one wonders what the Reverend Brown would say if he knew about his son's growing intimacy with a businessman who still boasts about thieving, as a teenager, from a telephone company and about cheating in exams: 'I filled little cards with prompt notes and hid them all over my clothing, in pockets and up my sleeves, and even tucked under my watchstrap.' Incorruptible as Brown believes himself to be, there is always original sin. Safer for any Prime Minister, surely, to stay away from Branson and his daredevil contempt for regulations. 'If I want to do something worthwhile - or even just for fun - I won't let silly rules stop me.'

For instance, as Vince Cable recently recalled in a Commons debate about the fate of Northern Rock, Branson did not let the law deter him, in 1971, from defrauding Customs and Excise of around £40,000, for which he was fined £20,000. 'There is therefore good reason,' Mr Cable told the Commons, 'to believe that the people who have to stump up the money for his consortium may well not regard him as a fit and proper person to run a public company, let alone a bank, and let alone as someone responsible for £30bn- worth of taxpayers' money.'

If it is a high-minded commitment to the principle of limitations that now blinds Gordon Brown to the shortcomings of a rescue operation in which the self-styled rescuer has spent years cultivating his reputation as a preposterously rich 'madcap', whose privatised railway service was once synonymous with suffering, you may think that simple self-preservation would prompt a measure of caution. And even if Brown spent most of their Asia trip reading to a rapt Branson from his book about the meaning of courage ('It was not just risk-taking and definitely not risk-taking in a doubtful cause'), he must surely be aware that there have been so many trusted confidantes before him, from Tony and Cherie, to Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher, for whom he used to pick up litter. If these luminaries ever subsequently looked themselves up in his autobiographies, they would have found they occupied substantially less index space than Branson's Auntie Joyce. As for the litter episode: it seems never to have happened.

'Sadly,' Branson told an interviewer at Davos two years ago, 'I don't think politicians are really in a position to change the world for the better. One of the problems politicians have is they come and go, but perhaps entrepreneurs can stay for 40, or 50 or 60 years.'

It cannot but help, on the other hand, if one of these ineffectual nonentities is, like Brown, reckless enough to enhance the brand of the entrepreneur in question, at the same time that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is advertising the merits of a privatisation, that will, if successful, involve the government-subsidised result having to pay for the privilege of identifying itself as a Virgin brand.

Branson's Screw It, Let's Do It philosophy may be more persuasive than it looks. Once Rophynol has been ruled out, and, given Mrs Brown's presence, undressed girls ('I believe in using sex appeal to promote the Virgin image'), we may have to accept that nothing more than crass self-promotion has convinced Brown, one of the most sanctimonious leaders in political history, that an act of collective altruism in favour of Branson and his financiers would be fairer, and more popular with taxpayers, than nationalisation. Unless he's just keen on space. A lot of boys are.

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