"All tongues speak of him, and the bleared sights/ Are spectacled to see him: your prattling nurse/ Into a rapture lets her baby cry/ While she chats him; the kitchen malkin pins/ Her richest lockram 'bout her reechy neck,/ Clambering the walls to eye him..." Thus Gary Richardson, describing Andy Murray's famous victory over Richard Gasquet on Tuesday morning's Today programme.

Eh? What's that? Oh, there's no deceiving you Times readers, is there? All right. It wasn't Gary Richardson on Andy Murray. It's Junius Brutus, the tribune of the people, describing Coriolanus's victorious return to Rome, as imagined by Shakespeare. Though you have to admit, there are certain points of similarity. For a dizzy 48 hours or so, until Wednesday evening's crash, you could hardly open a paper or turn on the telly without copping an eyeful of the clustering hordes of Wimbledon's finest kitchen malkins, reechy necks absolutely swathed in their best lockram, clambering Murray's Mount, or whatever they call it these days, to eye him.

Ah, but how fickle the affections of those Today sports presenters. How altered the mood at 6.30 yesterday morning. Comprehensive crushing by Nadal, said Jonathan Overend perfunctorily. Crowd disappointed. And on to the chances of Saucy Brown in the 7.25 at Newbury. See ya next year, Andy.

Certainly before, and even after, Murray's amazing victory over Gasquet, there was a tendency among the tribunes of the people (as we hacks love to think of ourselves) to wag the finger at Andy over his notorious churlishness; his grumpy refusal - part Coriolanus, part Kevin the teenager - to court popularity with the mob. “Just why is Andy Murray so hard to like?” mused my colleague Kevin Eason, the morning after. To which one brutal answer might be that - his talent, astonishing guts, sweetly pretty girlfriend and adorable puppy notwithstanding - he lacks charm.

That is not, of course, the end of the matter. In fact it is the beginning, in the sense that it brings us to the question that puzzled poor Coriolanus so fatally: why, with courage and ability to burn, should a person need charm as well? And while we're at it, what is charm? Can you get it if you're not born with it? And what's the point of it anyway?

Charm is at once quite unmistakable and the most elusive of qualities. You know it instantly when you see it, but it is as tangible as phosphorescence: far easier to say who has it than to explain exactly what it is. So, let's settle for the easy option, at least for the time being: Bill Clinton has it; Hillary doesn't. Tony Blair does; Cherie doesn't. Becks, yes; Posh, no. Boris, yup; Ken, 'fraid not. Tony Benn, gosh yes; Margaret Thatcher, gosh no. Charles James Fox, absolutely; Pitt, dear me, no. Noddy, I suppose so, if you like that sort of thing; Big Ears, oh, what do you think? David Cameron? Gordon Brown? Yes, well, I think we've all had enough of this game now, don't you?

There is something of the loved child about charmers - which is not to say that the uncharming are or were unloved or unloveable, but certainly an awareness of the power to fascinate and bend people to your will comes very early or not at all. Nor is charm necessarily cognate with extroversion. There are plenty of shy charmers, not to mention cold-hearted ones. Charm is, after all, the stock-in-trade of the seducer, the heartless flirt, the conman and the psychopath. Nor is it necessarily an unmixed blessing to its possessors.

Evelyn Waugh's Anthony Blanche, a powerful charmer himself, appears in Brideshead Revisited as an unlikely advocate for the Coriolanus/Andy Murray/Gordon Brown school of take me as I am or not at all, in devastating perorations on charm, delivered to the writhing narrator, Charles Ryder. In the first, when Charles is an Oxford undergraduate in the full flush of romantic attachment to the captivating Sebastian Flyte, Anthony pours the emotional equivalent of Paraquat on the blooming attachment, leaving a lingering taint from which it never quite recovers.

The second remonstrance is still more destructive, for it concerns Charles himself. In the intervening decades he has become a painter of some reputation, specialising in English architecture. But the discontents of middle age send him in a different direction, towards a series of pictures of the lush, uncontained savagery of the South American rainforest, and it is on these paintings that Anthony delivers his damning verdict. The gossip (says Anthony, his artful stammer bien en valeur) was that Charles's pictures were “most peculiar” ...“quite barbaric”...“downright unhealthy”. But when he got to the gallery, “All agog, my dear, what did I find? A very naughty and very successful practical joke...It was charm, again, simple creamy English charm, playing tigers.”

Charm, says Anthony, warming to his theme, “is the great English blight. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you”. His point - and it is, for all the high camp of its delivery, a deadly serious one - is that the appetite for charm is infantile. There is something about the longing to be continually beguiled and amused, in preference to the less appealing alternatives of real engagement, struggle and hard work, that ends by undoing those who succumb to it. “Loser” is the playground taunt for those who lack the common touch. But maybe it is we, the charm-obsessed mob, who are the real losers.

Times Recommends

• There's no future for prophets of doom
• New Labour family seethes with hatred
• Shallow, fake... Palin's beyond parody