Sometimes you just can't win. After years of being criticised for the dire nature of its online video content, Downing Street has just come up with something that's really – pretty good.

It's a response to an e-petition. In April the website received a petition calling for Jeremy Clarkson to be made prime minister (citing, as a reason, "Jezza is a legend", which I suppose is true).

Downing Street always posts responses to petitions and normally the replies to the jokey ones are pretty terse. But last night, in response to the Clarkson request, it put up this.

Okay, it's not quite Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. But I thought it hit the right note. It's already had 40,000 hits and at LabourHome someone has praised it as "Gordon Brown's first truly viral video".

But if Downing Street thought they would get any credit for this from their critics, they're in for a disappointment. In the Daily Mail today, Mark Wallace from the TaxPayers' Alliance is whingeing about the video being a waste of public money.

In the rightwing blogosphere, Dizzy Thinks has posted a response which is just as joyless.

And Guido Fawkes also put up the video under a "Your taxes at work" headline", although, to be fair, he did make the point that more people voted for Clarkson to be PM (49,447 people put their name to the petition) than have voted for Brown.

For the record, Downing Street tells me the video "didn't really cost anything at all".

A spokesman said: "It was done by our web team who had a spare half an hour over the summer. It was quite a light-hearted petition and we thought it deserved a light-hearted response."