Gordon Brown cracked a rather amusing joke during the Welsh Labour spring conference this afternoon. I can’t imagine he wrote it, of course, but here it goes.

“It has been a strange week,” he mused. “The only thing I haven’t been accused of recently is killing Archie Mitchell in Eastenders. For the press here: I promise you, I didn’t even lay a finger on him.”

You might have thought that the bullying allegations in the Observer would have damaged Brown and Labour.  I certainly didn’t expect Brown to be laughing it off so successfully six days later.

But yesterday I spoke to 30 or 40 members of the public while vox-popping my way up the M4. Not a single one took the allegations seriously or thought less of the prime minister because of them.

One of Brown’s most trusted advisors tells me that Labour’s private polling shows that – if anything – Bullygate has marginally increased Brown’s standing, especially among men. “They are the ones that we need to win back support from,” he says. Make of that what you will.