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Andy Burnham, is one of those government ministers that administrations prize highly, even if they don’t appear to. He’s one of those that the higher-ups send out to make an arse of themselves.

In other words, he’s the man with the job to spoonfeed us shit and tell us it’s sugar. In a former life, let us not forget, he was the pimp trying sell us the gussied-up, two-bit ID card scheme.

Today, in The Telegraph, he’s still a salesman just with different goods to move. He’s trying to sell us Tory policies on marriage. It’s not a good pitch. The car is obviously stolen – asking Burnham to do the respray job was probably a mistake. There are patches of blue visible all over through the overcoat of pinky, blushy could-be red.

I’m being cynical, of course. It’s merely A MASSIVE COINCIDENCE that Burnham would bring up a vastly similar dog-whistle issue in a right-wing newspaper at the end of a week when his party has had a right royal hiding,

“I think marriage is best for kids,” he says. “It’s not wrong that the tax system should recognise commitment and marriage.”

He goes on,

“I don’t seek to preach to anybody,” he says. “But in an abstract way I think it’s better when children are in a home where their parents are married and I think children do notice if their parents are married or not.”

To which, I’d reply, well, you don’t think very hard, do you Andy? I’ve been with my partner for 13 years this month, we have two children, seven and three, and aren’t married. In a blind taste test, I’d defy my kids to tell whether me and my partner are married: we’re knackered all the time, fight like cat and dog and hardly ever have sex.

It’s exactly like being married. If my partner and I were to arrive one day blissfully waving a piece of paper and declaring ourselves spliced, apart from asking where the cake was, my kids would be back picking their noses in front of The Simpsons before the hour was out. I’d be back with them and the Mrs would be back with her hands in the kitchen sink.

If a relationship works, it stays together with or without the confetti of marriage certificates and Cameron’s patronising twenty pound notes. And it’ll fall apart with or without the same.

And anyway, it’s a bit rich New Labour now deciding they want to tell us how to best live our lives when, in policy terms, they’re sleeping with another man’s wife.