Gordon Brown may be smarting from being described as a "secretive Stalinist bully", but Tony Blair and George W. Bush fared worse from the words of Frank Faulkner, a sociology lecturer at Derby University.
The two leaders featured in the terror expert's study into the psychopathic nature of evil, leadership and political mismanagement. Dr Faulkner regaled delegates of last week's Evil and Human Wickedness conference in Austria with an updated version of Machiavelli's law - that rulers must be prepared to do evil if good must come of it. Reassuringly, Dr Faulkner said neither leader was inherently "evil", but that they did need to have an almost psychopathic predisposition to ignore pain and suffering in order to function properly. Otherwise, they'd go nuts.