Just found some Labour MPs blog.

If nothing else it's good to see a politician, and a Labour one at that, staggering into the 21st century. Unlike the divine Blair, he has an email address, and I sent him one to see if he'd reply.

For the record, this is wot I rote, apropos the Peter Hain debacle

Hi Tom,

Nice blog. Good to see at least one politician dipping his toes into the twenty first century.

Now for some 20th Century politics:

"If there is one good thing to come out of a frustrating day it is that we have heard it from the horses mouth that we are not going to hit people in the upper bracket with more income tax"

What an amazing thing for a Labour politician to say at a time when there has never been more resentment about fat cat pay. Show's just how far the party has travelled and shows how you have let the right set the agenda to such an extent that to entertain the notion of the rich getting slightly less rich is some sort of heresy.

But as I understand it, Peter Hain was hardly advocating kicking down the doors of capitalism, and I think his point was that many people in the middle income bracket could have a lighter tax burden if the super rich - among them those executives who get millions for dragging companies through the mire - paid more.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the middle income, middle Englanders who brought New Labour to power in the first place?

Maybe, despite the inevitable howling from the press, this could have been a vote winner rather than a vote loser. Hey ho. We'll never know.

Anyway, I'll read your blog with interest.