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A thought occurs about this ‘novice’ tag that’s being bandied about. In his conference speech Gordon Brown said this:

Everyone knows that I’m all in favour of apprenticeships, but let me tell you this is no time for a novice.

And you think, unless I’m very much mistaken Gordon Brown has never led a country through an economic cataclysm before. Which makes him very much a novice as well. Unless he has a time machine allowing him to revisit the 1930s to dry-run his ideas, or he’s channelling the spirit of Ramsay MacDonald, he’s doing this for the first time. I certainly missed the speech in which he declared, ‘It’s fine – I’ve done this loads of times before and I’m a dab hand at it’.

We were all novices once. Tony Blair’s first cabinet contained just one person – Margaret Beckett – who had previous experience of serving in a government. For the rest it was on the job training and boy did it show.

Indeed, this ‘novice’ tag would carry more weight if New Labour didn’t have the awful habit of continually appearing like incompetent ingénues who fail to learn from experience. Tony Blair had fought three wars (Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan) before invading Iraq and yet the whole Iraq campaign turned out like a game of Risk played by chimpanzees wearing boxing gloves.

The litany of lost memory sticks and laptops and the wreckage of umpteen cack-handed computer systems shriek volumes about a government acting like a novice on every occasion. It blunders on like a two-ton toddler, never looking back at the carnage behind it.

The scrapping, backbiting, briefing, screaming, tantrums and smearing we’ve seen and continue to see over the New Labour leadership suggest that not a lot of growing up has been done since 1997. They might not be novices any more but they sure as hell act like it.