Like a particularly nasty dose of the clap that you think’s finally gone away after weeks of irritation only to return with a fiery vengeance, New Labour is back.

After weeks of being exhorted to “Vote Labour” and the enduring the chicanery of the relegation of the feckless ultra-Blairite “election supremo” Alan Milburn to the shadows of the campaign so that the, if not Old Labour then at least somewhat Vanilla Labour, Gordon Brown could save Blair’s sweaty hide, we’re now told that the new government’s programme is “quintessentially New Labour”. I’m pretty sure that my ballot paper said Labour and not New Labour as well.

I forced myself to watch again that stomach-churning election broadcast where Blair and Brown stare lovingly into each other’s eyes and utter those toe-curling, devoid-of-any-meaning platitudes. No mention of New Labour. At the end we’re told “if you want to take Britain forward not back then vote Labour”. I trawled through all the other interminable, intellectually-impoverished election broadcasts (still available on the New Labour website if you’re feeling particularly self-loathing) and there is nada New Labour. It’s plain Labour down the line.

Now, I’m not feeling diddled or lied to. I was quite aware at the time that a turd is still a turd no matter how much polish you try to give it and never stopped referring to New Labour as just that. The stink was still coming off the campaign no matter how many red roses it was adorned with. But what about the poor people who held their noses, assumed the position and put their tick in the Labour box only to get something quite different? The “New” was clearly dropped so that Labour voters found it easier to keep their breakfasts down as they did the deed. The spin was that Blair and his crew had backed away from the “unremittingly New Labour” plans. He’s listened and he’d learned. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

And he wants to restore respect to society! That’s the best joke of the lot when you realise he quite clearly thinks the British public are stupid, ignorant cattle. Sorry, capital.

Lying to the electorate is hard-wired into his psyche now. Blair is now incurable. To take away that part of him that will argue chicken shit is chicken salad would be to leave a drooling husk that you’d need to strap to a commode. Like a facehugger from the Alien movies, it can’t be removed without killing him.

Still, it never hurts to remind ourselves what a slippery, back-stabbing, contemptuous and untrustworthy charlatan Blair is. There’s nothing quite like the frisson of moral superiority even if it gets you precisely nowhere. He’ll be off earning vast piles of undeserved cash on the lecture circuit and drawing his bloated pension any day now and we’ll be left sweeping up and counting the pennies.

Ah, but will he be happy when he realises what the history books have in store for him? Do me a favour. I bet him and Cherie will strip off and rub each others naked bodies with piles of fifty pound notes. If you can’t bring yourself to get steamed up about ID cards, surely that image gets your dander up, even a little.