Eye-catching inanities

To adapt Macaulay, there is no spectacle so ridiculous as the Labour party in one of its periodic fits of ideology. While the heir-presumptive, Gordon Brown, has remained in old-fashioned purdah about his plans as prime minister, the jostling candidates to be his deputy leader have engaged in a shrill and often juvenile battle to win the favour of the Labour movement.

Peter Hain has railed against the ‘super-rich class’, conveniently forgetting that it is the generation of wealth, rather than socialist conviction, that subsidises the welfare state. Harriet Harman promises a ‘living link’ with the trade unions, which sounds more like a dead hand upon competitiveness. Hilary Benn, Jack Straw and Hazel Blears have added to the cacophony. Only Jon Cruddas has sounded like a man with a plan rather than a pleading supplicant.

Now Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has chipped in with a defence of single mothers and an insistence that marriage should not be favoured by government policy.