Off Centre | Who to snog, marry and avoid at the G20 – or, the essential guide to international relations

Forget rational choice theory and highfalutin ideas about ideology. The most useful tool for political analysis was lit upon by P. J. O’Rourke, who has made a career from arguing that politics is boring. A few years ago, the American author of Don’t Vote! It Just Encourages the Bastards, identified Snog, Marry, Avoid – a game played by schoolgirls that teaches them about the disposability of men – as being analogous to how we relate to politics and politicians.

My instinct tells me American schoolgirls might be more ruthless than most. And, indeed, O’Rourke’s designation for the game – Kill, Snog, Marry – is rather less innocuous than the one that has, seemingly, spawned a British reality television show in which young women given to wearing lots of make-up are scrubbed down with detergent and submitted, before and after, to a public multiple-choice verdict (Snog, Marry, Avoid). The adult variant, meanwhile, tends to substitute the “Snog” bit for something less polite.

To save the subeditors having to put asterisks everywhere, and Interpol from getting involved, we’ll stick here with the innocent version. Let it be noted, though, that the beauty of O’Rourke’s formula is in its consistency with politics’ precarious “three-legged stool”, comprising freedom (snogging), power (lethal force) and responsibility (marriage).

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