Here Lies

As your correspondent has pointed out on several previous occasions, Daveybloke the Cuddly Conservative is not the sort of chap to let a dead child go to waste when it can be utilised for the greater good of the No Longer Nasty Party. Now someone in New New Labour's press office has reminded the Glorious Successor that he has just as many dead children as the Leader of the Opposition, and the Glorious Successor has duly reminded the Evening Standard of the fact. It appears that the death of the Browns' first child, ten days after her birth in 2002, changed the way in which the Glorious Successor deals with bereaved people, including the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Perhaps it made him feel a bit more lugubrious while he sent more troops to the butcher's block. Such worthy quiverings of the moral compass, and the odd human-interest sympathy-scraper in the Evening Standard, are doubtless the best epitaph a modern politician's offspring can hope for.