Anyway, what’s been happening? Did you see that new cartoon series, Dave The Chameleon? Wasn’t it clever? At least we now know what all those loans for peerages got pissed away on - the kind of sub-student “humour” that also brought us the Michael Howard Bandwagon Watch and flying pig posters. I’m not a worldly man so if anybody can tell me which drug I should take to make Dave The Chameleon seem funny to me, please get in touch.

But then this desperation is common in New Labour campaigning methods and material. It’s all about what’s crap about the opposition and not what’s good about New Labour. All that money spent on a CGI lizard and not a single mention of why you should get off your arse and vote New Labour on May 4. It’s the same mentality that drove them to try and frighten protest voters during the General Election with threats of allowing the Tories in “by the back door“. And we see similar desperation in dark mutterings about New Labour voters defecting to the BNP - it’s all about keeping the other lot out of power without providing any reasons for keeping this lot in power.

There’s good grounds for the conclusion that they’ve realised that parroting just what (very) little good this Government has managed to summon in nine long years is in vain. It’s buried under a bowel-shuddering landslide of incompetence equivalent to malevolence, the “cruising hostility looking for an outlet“, endemic corruption and the breathtaking lack of fresh or original ideas.

Which is why the “Dave the Chameleon” distraction is also a spectacular demonstration of New Labour brass neck. A quick find and replace on the script for the cartoon and you have exactly what Tony Blair’s critics have been saying about him for nearly fifteen years.

…and it was then that Tony suddenly realised that telling everyone what the Labour Party really stood for was never going to make them or, more importantly, him very popular… From now on he would only tell people whatever he thought they wanted to hear…

In fact, it’s worse than that. New Labour accuse Dave of stealing other people’s ideas but not changing deep down while Blair and Brown have appropriated Tory ideas and resprayed them - PFI, competition in the provision of public services and the rest - because they really and truly believed in them.

“You can’t trust Dave,” they say, “because the second he gains power he’ll show his true colours” That’s fair enough and a good reason not to vote Tory. But by their logic, at least he’s clinging to his principles, which isn’t something of which you could accuse Blair and Brown who were more than happy to burn 100 years of Labour tradition to get where they wanted to be before demonstrating over many dispiriting years that they had no idea what to do with that power they’d compromised everything to gain.

Over his blue t-shirt Dave is wearing a red sweater which he’s going to coquettishly peel off when the time is right. Tony and Gordon threw away their red t-shirts and now just wear blue sweaters which they can’t take off because they’ve nothing on underneath. Except maybe for amatuerish tattoos that say “marginally less shit that the other lot”.

Update: Dave the Chameleon dissected. Tim Ireland wields the scalpel.