I’M rather enchanted at by the prospect of watching Ed Balls, a former shadow chancellor of the exchequer, doing a cha-cha in sequins on Strictly Come Dancing. This is the show where we get to see minor celebrities impersonating dancers and, as such, there could be no more appropriate showcase for Mr Balls’ footwork. After all, he’s spent his entire professional life impersonating a Labour politician.

Sadly, other commentators have expressed some disquiet at the decision by Mr Balls to participate in the nation’s favourite Saturday night light entertainment programme. They feel that, for someone who has held one of the great political offices in the country, exposing oneself to public ridicule in such a manner brings the course of public administration into disrepute. This is not a view that I share. Margaret Thatcher and her acolytes and disciples Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, David Cameron, George Osborne and Alistair Darling have all done more to diminish the reputation of Britain as a fair and equal country than anything that Mr Balls might do on Strictly.

Only people who still think we live in an actual democracy, bless them, think that any dignity is still attached to the grand offices of the UK Government. These places are reserved almost exclusively for those whose parents’ money bought them an education and then sustained them as they competed for a job… except there was no competition as their positions, not to mention their marriages, had all been mapped out for them. And when they have finished, they build property empires and businesses by exploiting their lofty positions. You can’t bring an office into disrepute if it doesn’t have a reputation in the first place.

Indeed, I’d go further and urge all those standing for national election to undertake a series of game-show tasks before the public gets to choose who among them is most worthy to represent them. Thus, in each UK constituency, rather than be exposed to several weeks of lies and empty promises, each of the candidates would be forced to participate in a series of challenges based on Dragon’s Den, The Apprentice and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

Games such as these can expose a person’s real character and reveal the essence of what they are really all about. Just like I’m a Celebrity, they would all start off cool and cocky and pretending they are all normal and sorted.

Eventually, though, they forget the cameras and begin to revert to type. In no time at all it becomes an adult version of Lord of the Flies and we discover who the psychopaths are, as well as the Walter Mittys, the inveterate liars and the merely delinquent.

This form of hustings could be trialled the next time a wee by-election crops up in somewhere like Norfolk where the locals perhaps may be more indulgent of bizarre and sinister behaviour than in other regions. Eventually, instead of those increasingly vapid and meaningless televised leadership debates we’d get Theresa, Jeremy, Nicola and the rest to play I’m a Politician... After a series of tasks they would then be asked to present their most important flagship policy on a special people’s version of Dragon’s Den.

Instead of forcing them to enter a tank full of snakes, spiders and cockroaches we could ask them to spend half an hour going round a shopping mall in… oh, I don’t know, Birmingham or somewhere like that where they would encounter other creatures that make a politician’s skin crawl: real people.

How entertaining would it be to see Theresa May grappling with the concept of winning a consignment of gourmet food and having to re-distribute it round the rest of the campers: “I’m only sharing this with those of you who have a bank account at Coutts.” That chap who leads the Liberal Democrats would be favourite to win as he played all the other sides off against the others. “If you ask me, Theresa, your leopard-print Manolos are so much more classy than Nicola’s vulgar Tartan Louboutins.” And then later that night as they fry marshmallows on the fire: “Nicola, your fuchsia Totty Rocks number is so chi-chi and makes Theresa look soooo frumpy.”

Later, in the diary-room Patrick Harvie would be grappling with his conscience. There’s the wee man, for whom jungle living ought to be like paradise on earth, confessing: “I really could go a smoked sausage supper. I propose we go on a hunting expedition: this place is pure hoaching with pigs. Can’t we just chop down all these trees and build centrally heated cabins out of them?”

After the intrepid political leaders’ urban jungle ordeal was over they’d face the dragons from Dragons Den; a panel of working punters representing a wide and diverse range of honest occupations and professions… and a police officer too.

“So, Mr Osborne; what’s that you’ve got there for us.”

“It’s called a quantitative easing machine. The way it works is that it prints lots more money to make up for all the cash that disappears out of the country when our party donors, sorry, corporate gangsters, avoid their taxes. That way we ensure that banks can keep paying bonuses to their chief executives while preaching financial discipline to the hoi-polloi. The idiot punters fall for it every time.”

“Isn’t that a bit irresponsible?”

“With all due respect, we only call it irresponsible when working class types do it, but not when Mark Carney does.”

“I’m out.”

“Hello Mr Corbyn, what’s that you’ve got in your hand?”

“It’s a Clause Four.”

“A Clause Four? Never heard of it.”

“Neither have any of my Parliamentary party colleagues.”

So I salute Mr Balls’s decision to follow in Ann Widdecombe’s dainty footsteps and Edwina Currie and George Galloway on a reality TV show.

For each of them it will have been the cleanest and most incorruptible contests they’ll ever have experienced.