Talentless Balls thought it was a good move to ring up a Spectator blogger and tell him to take down a post calling him a liar. The lie, I need hardly say, has been established beyond dispute. Not that it needed establishing. We have now entered a strange realm where everything a member of the cabinet says is assumed to be a lie unless there is hard evidence to the contrary. This appear to be a deliberate government strategy. It was exposed in the greatest newspaper in the observable universe.''We don't care if the commentators or the economists turn against us,' said one minister, 'This is all about shoring up the base in the northern heartlands which we lost in the European elections. We don't want or need them to understand the nuance of the argument. We just want them to hate the Tories again.''
The inhabitants of the 'heartlands' are, in Labour's eyes, too thick to tell the difference between a blatant lie and the truth so it's pointless worrying about such nuances. Lenin would be delighted. Meanwhile, I commend this article to you. Brown's apparent climbdown on the Iraq inquiry was forced by Blair's worries. But, of course, the climbdown doesn't matter because the heartland thickos won't understand. That's why he blithely climbs down on everything. Nothing matters because the voters are idiots. Of course, politics is a dirty business. But has it ever been this dirty, this pathetic, this cynical, this mendacious? My best hope is that this is mere decadence. Labour, exhausted and corrupted by power, has slumped into its death throes. Soon it will be gone. My worst fear is that this is not decadence but rather a fundamental change in the nature of British politics.
