Ever since I heard about Cameron’s ‘full-bladder’ technique, in relation to the EU veto, I have been unable to look at him without imagining a long-retained stream of thick yellow piss working its way down his trouser leg onto the floor. There is something horribly appropriate about the man’s piss-retention, grotesque but banal, just like his plastic mask of a face. He is a man who would feel empowered by exercising the most basic infantile control over his own body, who probably times his shits based on digestive intensity so that he is always ready to grasp the real utopian telos of the bum egg whenever he pulls his cheeks apart and squats gurning over the bowl. In short: an ‘anal character’ (as much as I don’t care for Freud).

It is not hard to make the leap from this characterisation of Cameron’s psychology to that psychology operating behind his cuts. Here is a really disasterous economic policy – austerity – one so dangerous in a recession that its acceptance by first the coalition and then apparently the whole world can only be motivated by something beyond economics, I mean actual mental illness. Austerity, and support for austerity, is nothing less than a form of psychosis, and it is exemplified by weird little incidents like the time Cameron told (or, almost told, but then even he realised it was so stupid he didn’t) people to pay off their credit card bills rather than spending money to stimulate economic growth: essentially his economic policies are those of an ‘anal character’ running a household. There they make a sort of modest sense, admittedly, but this is not a household, it is a government.

Either way, this simple little working-through helps us understand why the image of Cameron retaining (and then, inevitably releasing) his piss is a genuinely political one as well as to do with Cameron The Man (if he is even, really, worthy of the dignity of manhood): he thinks we must cut (he thinks he must retain his piss) but he also exercises a perverse pleasure from doing so (he wants to boast about his piss, he tells people about his technique like a proud child would, in doing so we are presented with the image of it dribbling down his leg).

Today, Ed Balls has revealed to the world that he, too, likes to retain his piss. There he was, in the Guardian, on the TV, telling everyone about how he has come to the realisation that it is fun to retain your piss, that it helps you focus your mind, that his less frequent toilet visits have made his office run more efficiently as less water is consumed (flushing). There he sat in front of the anchor, sodden trousers. The pages of the newspaper, crinkly, as they had all been splashed with a bit of Balls’s piss before being sent to the shops.

And the oddest thing is, of course, that this is somehow supposed to help him look electorally credible. Anchors have been pressing Labour for over a year now: “when are you going to start admitting you need to retain your piss?” “How can you be considered credible on the economy if you visit the toilet as and when you need it?” “Wouldn’t the public be reassurred if they saw your bladder reaching full pressure on TV and then it all trickling out as you carried on talking?” There is this perception that the public really like their politicians to be psychotic piss-retainers with damp trousers. And Ed Balls, to his credit, stood up for the sane man who isn’t covered in piss, and said well no, that’s stupid, every single serious individual thinks these piss-freaks are dangerous lunatics. But no more, alas. And I am sure the right wing of Labour will think it is A Good Thing that he is now taking this horribly incorrect approach to piss.

I am struggling, really, to work out why it might be that electoral credibility is associated so intimately with piss retention. Either a) it is a right-wing piss conspiracy between the Tories and the media or b) the public actually like their leaders to have that urine tang on them. We are reminded here of Ballard, who in his faux-focus group write-up ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’, explained the genital nature of Ronald Reagan’s face (“a penile erection”) and notes that in sexual fantasies involving Reagan, “the preferred mode of entry overhwlemingly proved to be the rectal” (as opposed to the vaginal). In the ideal sex-death of Daz Caz, perhaps he is releasing a long-stored stream of urine all over you? It seems that for the average Englander, something like this must be the case, as else we could not explain his electoral success and continued credibility as Prime Minister.