The composer Delius was a bit of a lad. In his early years he caught syphilis which, in his later years, left him blind and wheelchair bound. In order to continue writing music, Delius took on Eric Fenby as his amanuensis to who he dictated his final works.

So what’s David Miliband’s excuse for his incoherent, opaque utterances that need interpreting by flunkies? He ‘wrote’ an article for the Guardian yesterday which has the likes of publicly-funded gossip Nick Robinson (the BBC’s ‘political editor’) breathless with excitement.

Apparently, it was not what Miliband said in his piece but what he didn’t say (that is, full-throated support for the Prime Minister) which has caused the fuss. The article is apparently a coded signal that Miliband is ready to usurp Gordon Brown and take the country for his own.

I have to confess that I saw the piece as merely a repetition of the usual vacuous New Labour platitudes, a packet of politically nutrition-free rice cakes, if you will, which when munched on reveal themselves to be something else altogether indigestible. Some of us have still got the bills to pay, David, while you’re crapping on about the ‘public service challenge’, ‘pursuing traditional goals in a modern way’, and an obsessive-compulsive ‘restlessness for change’.

Nevertheless, Miliband’s own amanuenses – the aforementioned Robinson along with the likes of the Independent’s Steve Richards – are feverishly transcribing the man who would be king’s utterances and fashioning them into something allegedly coherent.

You have to say that if the article was a warning to Gordon Brown, it was a particular craven and skulking one. Don’t beat about the bush David, say what you really mean. If you think you’ve got the balls to run this country then let’s see them. Don’t leave it to self-serving journalists to sketch them from their imagination. It’s the bulldog spirit we’re after not Scooby Doo.

If, on the other hand, the article was a genuine statement of intent for the future of New Labour and not a piss-weak gissa job, then it’s merely a restatement of the admission that at the heart of the party is an echoing, policy-free void.

There’s nothing new in what he’s saying. Is Miliband’s article anything more than reworked brochure blurb for a once shiny election winning machine that never had or found the versatility to do anything else? You might as well expect a brick to double up as a Swiss Army Knife.

You can swap the gawping Scot for the bum-fluffed kid if you like, but in terms of change or new ideas or direction or whatever else it is we’re supposed to expect from a 43 year-old who went from Oxford to MiT to policy wonk to safe seat to ministership to cabinet without touching the sides, you might as well put David’s face on Gordon’s head Face/Off style for all the difference Prime Minister Miliband is going to make. The government will still be in a state of paralysis and dependent on willing minions to translate its obscure utterances.