When Roy won the Booker in 1997 she was the can-do-no-wrong darling of the Indian media.
"You've got it on the wrong shoulder, darling," he told one bewildered student.
Likened earlier this year by Lord Turnbull, a former cabinet secretary (Britain's top civil servant), to Macavity the cat, who was never to be found at the scene of the crime, the prime minister will find it hard now to evade his own responsibility for what has gone wrong on Mr Darling's brief watch.
Daniel, 28: You're probably talking to the wrong person there, darling.
As Springsteen sang out, "To say I'd make your dreams come true would be wrong, but maybe, darling, I could help them along," a decidedly loving and feminist outlook on what a marriage could provide, I felt so connected to the music.
For me? Hi darling, anything wrong – oh Christ, it's died – did you not charge it before you left?
He has said Mr Darling was wrong to commit the party to halving Britain's record budget deficit in four years, telling BBC News that although he had toed the party line in government privately he "didn't think it could have been done".
When she comes home put the very sad face and say "cries" when she says "What is wrong?" You say "Your darling baby, she ran away" then "cries more".
Not wrong to observe that Mr Darling is running a humdrum campaign: he is.
Before that he had already been noticed by the reading public with the stories collected as The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950).
