This is not because I have some idealistic, romantic notion of
the Labour Party, though my father and grandfather passionately saw it as the instrument for redressing privilege and improving the lot
of working people.

Nor have I a purist's view of where the Conservative Party should stand. The appeal of the Liberals or Liberal Democrats remains a mystery, except as a protest vote. The Greens have become silly, confused zealots, and the UK Independence Party is far too narrowly based, however attractive its Euroscepticism, to be sustainable. I remain free to say what I think.

After all these years, I do not expect Labour to practice socialism or the Conservatives to leave everything to the market. They never did, even under Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher. It was all relative, as it had to be. Whatever Government we acquire, Britain has to compete in the world within a semblance of global order – and a much shrunken world since I indulged my political fancy.

Having said all that, I think I am entitled to ask what has happened to the Labour Party of my ancestors. I do not refer to its disastrous decision, if that is the right word, to crown Gordon Brown as its leader without so much as a vote. That probably reflects its addiction to Buggins' turn and the chronic ability of all political parties to put up with anything so long as they think they have a chance of winning. After all, the Conservatives did not ditch Margaret Thatcher, about whom many had doubts, until they thought – wrongly – that she
was a loser.

It now looks as if Gordon Brown is a loser not a leader, to paraphrase David Cameron.

But Brown has not so far proved to be a drastic departure from Tony Blair in terms of ethos or policy. It may be that he is just not up to it – and an unlucky general to boot, in that the consequences of the global credit crunch, the roaring growth of China and India and some daft energy and environmental policies leading to soaring energy and food prices, have joined
to hit us where it hurts just as
the clever dickery of his final Budget as Chancellor catches
up with him.

But after 11 years of Labour governance, we have seen enough to look critically into the party's soul. Just what does it now stand for after the recent painful consequences of Brown's doubling the starting rate for tax from 10 to 20p?

As the narrow party politician that he is, he did this – stealthily, as usual – solely to trump the Tories' claim to be the tax-cutters by reducing the then 22p rate to 20. I am prepared to credit him with believing that his impossibly complicated tax credits system would compensate the 5.3m of the poorest-paid rendered potentially worse off by his simultaneously raising and lowering income tax rates.

But let us give no-one credit for the settlement that has bought off a Labour rebellion since, even if the Treasury can sort out the mess, it leaves 4.3m of the poorest still potentially out of pocket. That is not helping working people.

It does not come as a surprise to me – a former labour correspondent and then civil servant in the Departments of Employment, Energy and Prime Minister – to discover the labour movement's contempt for ordinary folk as pawns, for example, in the abuse of trade union power.

But the Government's latest shabby political fix has surely blown apart Labour's pretensions to having a monopoly of TLC for those at the bottom of the pile.

This is only the latest fall in the collapse of Labour's moral ground during the Blair/Brown years. Its enthusiastic espousal of the evils of spin, the corruption of statistics for presentational purposes, the declaration of war on a false, let alone dodgy, prospectus, the hounding to death of Dr David Kelly and the refusal to honour a manifesto commitment in the form of a referendum on the EU treaty, have combined to leave Labour horribly tarnished.

This is what happens when all that matters is power. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power to corrupt absolutely. Labour is beginning to stink. My father and grandfather would be mortified. So am I.