‘He’s nearly there,’ Mrs Bush revealed at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, where the family have been living since leaving the White House in January. ‘I think the penny may finally drop in the next few weeks that he isn’t the leader of the free world any longer.’

Mr Bush, 62, first showed signs of noticing that something was up in late February, when Mrs Bush says he asked her where ‘the nucular codes box’ was, referring to the briefcase which had been carried around behind him by a Secret Service agent every day for the previous eight years.

‘Then in late March we had a call from Condoleezza Rice to say hello,’ Mrs Bush added. When her husband asked why he hadn’t seen any of his Cabinet members for three months, a convenient excuse was found, she admitted. ‘We told him that Dick Cheney had shot them all and they were in hospital. Otherwise it would all have been too much too soon.’

More recently, Mr Bush has taken to standing forlornly in the corner of his lounge at home in Texas. ‘At first we thought he had gone a bit nuts like Cheney,’ his wife said. ‘But then we realised that, deep down, he was beginning to notice that he hadn’t been in any oval rooms for quite a while.’

If Mr Bush does cotton on this summer, as his wife seems confident he will, then he will have made significant progress since 2001, when it took him more than a year to understand that he had been elected president.

‘When we first moved in to the White House and George hadn’t realised what was going on, that Al Gore just got madder and madder,’ said Mrs Bush. ‘So at least this new guy doesn’t really care what George thinks. Which is funnily enough what a lot of people have been saying to me for a while, actually.’

‘It’s been a struggle,’ admitted Gore in an interview with Fox News. ‘I’ve grown to hate that man Bush more than I thought could be possible. Not only do I get up each day to find that he’s doing the job I should be doing, I then have to pretend to go and do it anyway.’ Gore went on to describe how he has employed a team of ‘advisors’ and ‘security personnel’ to supervise wife Tipper and keep her away from all forms of media in case she caught on that her husband wasn’t actually the 43rd president of the United States.

‘Obviously Tipper was keen to get into the White House and make her mark on the place, but I had to keep stalling her,’ Gore explained. ‘At first I claimed it was being redecorated, but that only bought me a few weeks, so then I said there was subsidence. I was quite pleased with that one, but it was 9/11 that really put me in the clear. After that I was able to tell her that the CIA had credible intelligence the White House was a target for terrorists and it was best we just stayed put in the family home in Nashville, Tennessee.’

Although Gore admitted that he felt awful regaling his wife each night with accounts of his fictional successes while the real president fouled up the economy and foreign relations, it was filling the time that proved his biggest challenge. ‘To be honest, I’d never been too fussed about the environment or good causes,’ he said, ‘but everyone needs a hobby and there are only so many times I could recount all those votes cast in Florida.’

While Tipper Gore is reported to be looking forward to resuming normal life after the conclusion of husband Al’s ‘second term’ on 20 January, she has apparently written to Michelle Obama warning her that being First Lady may not turn out to be quite what she’d expected. Gore meanwhile has conceded that he’ll need to draw on all the qualities that made him one of America’s greatest presidents if he is to explain to his wife the recent deterioration in Israeli-Palestinian relations following the historic 2003 ‘President Gore Peace Accord’.