We’ve heard so much in recent years about the Tories being such a poor opposition to the Government but boy, how the tables have turned in recent weeks. The Tories have had so much clear ground to extol their own particular culture of fear that you’d think it was New Labour floundering in electoral obscurity.

So, another Groundhog Day for Alan Milburn. But imagine him not as a disgruntled TV weatherman but more of a Pastor Niemöller figure.

Picture Alan hauling himself out of bed this fine Sunday morning. His normally lustrous bouffant is tousled and slightly greasy. He is unshaven and looking a little more haunted, hunted around the eyes. He isn’t sleeping well these days. He goes downstairs, still yawning, picks the Sunday papers up from the doormat and is met with:

“Howard stirs race row with attack on Gypsies”

See Alan standing in his hallway, stunned. They’ve got him again. Almost robotically, he starts to chant, adding to his mental list:

First they came for the asylum seekers, but I was not an asylum seeker, so I said nothing.

And then they came for the Gipsies, but I was not a Gipsy, so I did little.

The newspaper falls to the floor. He puts his head in his hands and begins to weep. Between shaking sobs, he thinks the day he himself is taken away will be a blessed relief.