I HAVE a vague idea which I think might work. What if we all came out of our houses with our hands up and said "OK, Bono, fair cop, guv. Hands up. You were right. U2 are the best band in the world. You've passed the audition. Now would you please go away." Mind you, it would have to be everybody. You know what Bono is like. If he thought there was one person left out there unconvinced he'd have to keep at them until he changed their mind.

I haven't listened to U2's latest album for quite a while. Actually, I found that it didn't really bear repeated listening. I found the song that centred around him buying a new apartment in New York particularly nauseating. Then again, as Alice Cooper once pointed out, when you start heading towards 50 you really have to stop writing songs about how much you hate your parents. As Bono gets older we will presumably get more songs about property deals, the school run, and eventually the weather and how a half crown was a fortune in his day.

Neither did I go to Slane. If I want to get drunk and watch a bunch of 40-year-olds singing U2 songs I'll go to a Karaoke night. But despite the fact that I've done everything in my power to avoid U2 recently, somehow I feel like Bono's been living in my house for the last month or so. I feel I know every thought that goes through his head, I certainly know more about his childhood and his life than I do about my own. I know what his friends think about him courtesy of TV documentaries, featuring said friends, and newspaper articles written by them. And by the way, they think he's great.

I know what Bono's manager thinks of him and his band. (Apparently he thinks they're great too.) I even know what the person who designs U2's sleeves thinks about Bono because I've read two interviews with him in the last week or so. He thinks they're great, too. God help us, I even know what Eamon Dunphy would do if he met Bono in Lillie's.

It was the fawning Irish Times supplement last week that really did it. It allowed the various players in the U2 camp, including Paul McGuinness, the band's business manager, to set out their stalls without being asked one awkward question. If any other businessmen of this magnitude were allowed to advertise themselves and their products so blatantly the paper of record would've had to write 'Advertising Feature' across the top. But the IT had its tongue too firmly lodged where Bono thinks the sun shines out of, to have any perspective on the whole thing.

This was not supposed to happen again. This happened in the late Eighties, it all got out of control and it was definitely not supposed to happen again. We, the public, were determined it would never happen and Bono and U2 promised it would not happen. It turns out they were lying. Obviously, the band's retreat from global domination at the end of the Eighties was simply a matter of not knowing where to go next. All the irony and the embarrassing flirtations with dance music it was all just a sham, a brief lull while U2 figured out how to take over the world again. Bono as much as said that he had lost the run of himself by the late Eighties and that he wouldn't blame people for turning on him, that his stadium rock histrionics were embarrassing and empty.

Barely more than a decade on and here we are again. U2K The Millennium Bug. Bugging us. They told us they didn't want to take over the world anymore but it turns out they just didn't know how for while. In the Nineties they were the dinosaurs swept away by the punk of dance music, but all they were waiting for was another opportunity to be rock gods again. And thanks to the fact that there is no other interesting big band around at the moment they've slipped in the back door again. Bono thinks he's the Messiah once more and we all have to listen. This must be what it was like for Mary and Joseph in front of the neighbours. "Has he been bothering you with the Messiah stuff again? I'm so sorry. If we've warned him about that once we've warned him ten times."

HERE'S a thought for you. U2 are good, but they're not that good. Most of their albums contain one or two classics, three or four good songs and 50 per cent fillers. That's a good enough track record but it hardly merits the acres of salivating coverage U2 have been attracting recently. Their new album wasn't so much good, it was more just a relief to everyone that it wasn't as bad as their Nineties albums. But somehow, no one is allowed to say anything bad about U2 anymore.

What cosy consensus has decided that it is a good thing that the Prime Minister of a country should call into a rock and roll band's dressing room before they play a gig, as Bertie Ahern did at Slane last weekend? Of course, it was Bertie who fixed it so that U2 could play the second gig, their "gift" to the people of Ireland. When Bono wants something done he goes straight to the top, because Bono is not just a musician, he is a player. He hob nobs with world leaders, wielding vast influence and power with them. Establishment rock. It's all the go.

Most of us have nothing against being sold a product. But somehow when that package is parcelled as peace, love and integrity you feel like you're being taken advantage of. For example, the second Slane gig U2's gift to the people of Ireland. U2 grossed three million quid from the two Slane gigs. They managed to cram in 160,000 people in two gigs, whereas in the rest of the world it would have taken them eight nights to play to that many people. The rest of the world got to watch U2 in indoor venues, in relatively intimate settings. In Ireland people got to stand in a field with 80,000 other people because Slane has such meaning for U2. Bono has obviously taking tips on public appearances from his old buddy the Pope.

And speaking of which, what rock star should be cosying up to a Pope who has held the church back decades? That particularly gruesome photo-op ("Who's that there with God's representative on earth?") was as nothing next to Bono's choice of political pals. What rock star should be cosying up to Silvio Berlusconi and publicly sharing jokes with Vladimir Putin? What self-respecting do-gooder rock star would be seen dead with North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms? Bono would.

Jesse Helms is one of Bono's powerful buddies in the profoundly misguided Drop the Debt campaign. The 79-year-old recently attended a U2 concert and Bono sent him a note afterwards proclaiming that "You are blessed and I am to know you, love Bono." Bono has called Helms a brave and a bold man.

The bravery perhaps refers to Helms's long-standing opposition to gay rights. Indeed, on the day that Helms attended the U2 concert a piece of anti-gay legislation sponsored by the old man was being enacted. In the Eighties, Helms attempted to block AIDS funding to punish homosexuals for their revolting conduct. Helms's boldness may be a reference by Bono to Helms' anti-black stances. Helms has referred to Martin Luther King as a pervert and said that the 1964 Civil Rights Legislation was the most dangerous legislation ever introduced into Congress. When sharing a lift with Carol Moseley-Brown, the first-ever African-American female in Congress, Helms hummed Dixie.

But then Irish-Americans have never been known for their right-on views about African- American blow-ins and Bono, don't you know, has just bought a place in New York.

And meanwhile, the product sells like hotcakes. Paul McGuinness is going around telling anyone who'll listen that All That You Can't Leave Behind is set to outsell The Joshua Tree.

AND that, apparently, is what it's all about. Suddenly Bono's unlikely friendship with Ronan Keating makes sense. Can't you just picture the two of them, up half the night, discussing territories, sales figures and hair dye?

At times, the marketing spin gets too much. It would perhaps be churlish to suggest that there is a degree of opportunism in the very public linking of two of the songs from the new album with recently dead rock stars (Joey Ramone and Michael Hutchence). But U2's willingness to jump on board the bandwagon of the awful Lara Croft movie certainly suggests a complete lack of the kind of integrity on which U2 sell themselves. Having friends write profiles of you for newspapers is a bit off-putting also, as is allowing someone to make a smug documentary of you and your friends going around New York like a bunch of Avant Garde intellectuals musing on friendship and faith.

And, underneath it all, I like Bono and I like U2's music. I can only imagine what it must be like for those of you who don't. Bono has screwed up again. More than anything he seems to need to be loved by everyone, and we were prepared to do that to a certain extent. But then he had to go and blow it again by taking over the world and trying to save it.

There is perhaps one image which best sums up Bono's politics. That was when he held John Hume and David Trimble's hands together at that concert celebrating peace in the North. Bono wasn't around for any of the messy stuff, the negotiations and all that. But he was quite happy to stand there and make the naive gesture in front of a crowd of fawning teenagers and somehow, to take credit for the whole thing. Neither is he interested in the intricacies around cancelling debts owed by repressive African regimes. He's happy to be there for the photo ops though. If you called him on this he'd probably explain to you that he's just a rock star, man. If only he were happy to be so.

Addressing a Harvard graduation ceremony recently Bono pointed out that there was only one thing worse than an egotistical rock star and that is "a rock star with a conscience a placard- waving, knee-jerking fellow travelling activist with a Lexus and a swimming pool shaped like his own head."

It was a rare moment of self-awareness. Healer heal thyself. Hey Bono, maybe it's time to go away and dream it all up again. And give the rest of us a break for a few years.