Ms Hewitt Was Unavailable For Comment

More old news. The Thatcher Government funded the Paedophile Information Exchange. Next week's revelation is to be the death of Queen Anne.

Or the goings on at Elm House. Remember that name: Elm House. Tom Watson deserves the presently vacant spot in the Order of Merit, which was previously disgraced by Baroness Thatcher of Elm House.

In its opposition to what became the Protection of Children Act 1978, the National Council for Civil Liberties, under Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt, was opposing the Labour Government of the day. It had been taken up and given Government time, but it had begun as a Private Member's Bill, introduced by a Conservative MP who was to go on to become one of the Thatcher Government's most dedicated critics.

There was really no dividing line whatever between the strongly anti-worker, or at any rate anti-working-class, New Left and the "libertarian" New Right, so that the New Left's eventual capture of the Labour Party after the death of John Smith wholly predictably entailed a full capitulation to the Thatcherism that the New Right had defined, although the New Left had named it.

Patricia Hewitt is a key figure in that whole story. She it was who told speakers at Labour Conferences, "Do not use the word "equality"; the preferred term is "fairness"." She it was, a mere Press Officer, who, in a sign of things to come, was not told where to get off for having presumed so to instruct her betters.

She went on to help found the Institute for Public Policy Research, and then, soon after Tony Blair became Leader, to become Head of Research at Andersen Consulting, a position for which she had no apparent qualification beyond her closeness to the Prime Minister in Waiting.

In 1997, she entered Parliament, he entered Downing Street, the Labour commitment to regulate such companies was dropped, and so was the previous Conservative Government's absolute ban on all work for Andersen in view of its role in the DeLorean fraud.

Andersen paid just over £21 million of the £200 million that Thatcher and Major had demanded, barely covering the Government's legal costs.

It went on to write, among other things, a report claiming that the Private Finance Initiative was good value for money, the only report on the subject that the Blair Government ever cited, since the only one to say that ridiculous thing.

As Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Hewitt tried to give auditors limited liability. It took the Conservative Opposition and the Bush Administration to see her off.

But ignore the attempts to drag Bryan Gould into the PIE business. It had framed itself in terms of equalisation of the age of consent (he cannot have been expected to have been familiar with the P word, which was barely used in those days), but he still managed to fob off its approach with "don't call me".

Herewith, his commendation of my Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory, which was published two years ago this week, and in which appears, among many other things, the story of Hewitt, Harriet Harman, and the PIE:

"Current orthodoxy – both in economic policy and right across the board – has so manifestly failed us that we desperately need some fresh thinking and a different way of looking at our problems. That is precisely what David Lindsay provides in this stimulating book."

By the way, the BBC, like the Daily Mail, has always known everything that it now claims to have "uncovered".

Magpie, in which Hewitt's and Harman's NCCL advertised underneath sexualised pictures of young boys and alongside advice to buy The Brownie Annual for the photographs, was not even a subscription-only publication. In London, at least, it was sold in newsagents.

Those were the times. As politely as he could have done in those times, Bryan said no to the PIE. He deserves every credit for that. But the people who went on to become New Labour did not, and do not.