Instead of feeling battered and bruised, they might be prepared to get on to the streets and campaign with enthusiasm. Turnout might even increase in Labour’s heartland areas and the Government, if re-elected, might actually have some authority.The trouble with New Labour, as Mr Seddon pointed out, is that it does not really want to be a mass party any longer. It wishes to secure just enough votes in the “right” constituencies in order to win and is no longer much concerned about its former bedrock supporters – let alone the underclass. New Labour has bought the Tory tax rhetoric, but it has not understood that this implies an annual requirement to adjust tax-band thresholds upwards. The party will enter the next election in the unenviable position, from a Labour activist’s perspective, of dragging more people into the tax net than its avowedly tax-raising predecessors of the 1970s.In much the same way, the Tories have allowed themselves to become terrified of the charge that they are the anti-European Party.

But what is wrong with being publicly anti-European and embracing the fact that polls consistently show that over 40 per cent of the public, given the chance to withdraw from Europe, would vote to do so? Such a withdrawal would provide an annual saving of over £10bn, being the net contribution that the UK pays as its annual membership fee.The logic of withdrawal makes sense to those – the majority – who see joining the single currency and signing up to the new constitutional convention as a disaster for Britain. Tories would be able to campaign with enthusiasm on a policy in which they genuinely believed. Instead, they sit squirming as Mr Blair blunts their legitimate attacks on his European policy. Yet they would be better able to energise their activists if they carried through the logic of their policy and embraced withdrawal.Think what a battle royal there would be at the next election if the main political parties actually campaigned on behalf of their members’ beliefs Turnouts would certainly be up. Party activism would once again become an honourable volunteer pastime Political parties belong, first, to their supporters. The electorate has the right to have the final say, but, in the long run, the voters are ill served by parties that are empty shells based on what they are told by focus groups rather than their own supporters.mrbrown pimlico.freeserve.co.uk.

It was a rare and special privilege for this column to be granted the first public interview by one of the lesser-known beneficiaries of the recent government reshuffle, Lord Truthbender, who will head up the new Ministry of Presentation. So little is known about the New Labour peer that when he appeared at the office, a sleek, well-lunched man, I started by asking him precisely what qualifications he brought to his new job. I’ve been an estate agent, an advertising copywriter, I’ve worked in TV, where I dreamt up fake identities for the great Jeremy Beadle. Then I became a barrister.”"That job history suggests a talent for presenting one thing to look like another.”"What we call creative deception, yes – ‘lying’, in old-fashioned parlance. We now live in such a morally sophisticated society that people with normal ambition know they have to lie to get on These days a fact is only a fact if you want it to be one. The Government takes its responsibility towards creative deception very seriously.”"So why the need for a Minister of Presentation?”"Ministers are now so adept at changing their stories that occasionally there has been confusion.