It's All For Little Ivan

Daveybloke's staff have been "privately angered" by some remarks of Lord Owen's about one of the more endearing aspects of the anti-NHS bill; namely Daveybloke's use of his own dead and disabled child as a propaganda weapon. With something of an excess of tact, Owen wrote that "most of those who work in the health service were aware of his own late son's illness" rather than noting, as he might have done, that Daveybloke shoved the poor kid under our noses at every opportunity: this was how Daveybloke knew nurses and teachers might have their uses, this was why Daveybloke thought social services were necessary, this, this, this was why Daveybloke would cut the deficit and not the NHS. Look upon me, proles, and see yourselves writ noble! Go on, smell the family values!

What the boy's mother must have thought of her husband at such moments is difficult to imagine; now that the promises for which her dead son stood surety have been so casually and contemptuously broken, her admiration must know no bounds.