Humble PIE?

And so, the Daily Mail may actually have saved Harriet Harman.

They'll be spitting tacks around Ed Miliband, and there'll be tears in the cornflakes for a good number of perfectly credible aspirants to the office of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

But the Mail, already looking for a distraction from this year's impending revelations about Elm House, suddenly also had to find one from last month's arrest of Patrick Rock.

By the way, Rock would have been an MP if he had not lost the 1984 Portsmouth South by-election. To Mike Hancock.

The key thing now is to ensure that the PIE story, which is the key to understanding both Thatcherism and New Labour, does not suddenly disappear again.

My former editor gives his home address (and his mobile telephone number, and his personal email address) in Who's Who.

Ask him why he sat on this story for 30 years.

And ask him why he dismissed the man who by then had already been banging on about it publicly for the better part of a decade, despite being only 32 at the time.

In fact, if you happened to have the cost of the postage lying around, then why not write to all of his neighbours and ask them to ask him by what group loyalty from a bygone age he felt moved to do those things?