Dave has some special new Labour friends

Anne McElvoy spots a new political type: the ‘Labrators’ who have more in common with Cameron than Brown, and may co-operate with a Tory government

The Labrators are coming: cross-bred symbols of shifting political times. Labour by background and allegiance, they empathise with many of the New Conservatives’ aims and obsessions. As for the political divide, they don’t so much straddle it, as just ignore it.

The only question is how far they’ll go, now that the party that dominated the landscape is a shrunken spectre of its former self. ‘The thing to watch,’ says one of the resigners from Cabinet last week, ‘is who will get involved with Project Cameron and who won’t cross that line.’

Commons floor-crossers have always been with us, treated with some distrust by both their parental and adoptive parties. But as the boundaries between the main parties’ ideologies narrow, fear of contamination by collusion is far less oppressive than it was.