Milly Tant

Anyone who believes that David Miliband is capable of being Prime Minister should read his extraordinary review, in the Observer, of Anthony Giddens’s Over To You, Mr Brown: How Labour Can Win Again. There, this alleged genius, who has never had a proper job and who was educated at one of those private schools which have the effrontery to send the bill to the taxpayer so that they can pretend to be normal London comprehensives, writes that he finally knew the Major Government to be doomed when he heard about the cones hotline.

Well, he is certainly very slow on the uptake, in that case. But more to the point, he explains that "the party of monetarism, privatisation and deregulation had become the party of motorway repairs."

Most people assume Milly and his brother to have broken with their father’s Marxism. But in fact it could not be clearer that certainly Milly One, and no doubt Milly Two as well, despise boringly practical attempts by politicians to improve the lives of boringly ordinary people. Such are the grounds on which the sectarian Left, whence came neoconservatism in general and the New Labour Project in particular, has always despised the Labour Movement. Milly is a textbook case.

Oh, and didn’t I read somewhere that they had banned the transatlantic trade in human beings as commodities…?