Keen to promote any form of help for the aged, Old Folk’s Tsarina Joan Bakewell seems to have forgotten New Labour’s grubby past in this area.

Labour luvvies Andrew Marr and Dame Bakewell-Tart were doing their bit for the Party early this morning. “Please can we stop saying ‘death tax’ etc” in relation to Aged Care, and aren’t the Tories simply ghastly and so forth.

Andy Burnham has done an excellent job of pretending he’s been shafted by Tories he called in to discuss the topic of home care….so now he’s challenging them to show how to pay for it. This is hypocrisy of a special order, given the whole home-care scam was revealed as a cynical cop-out by Alan Johnson – in these columns, as it happens – some two years ago when he was at Health. Postie Al’s dementia (if we’re being kind) didn’t allow him to work out that social-workers-on-wheels might be twenty times more expensive than the disgracefully awful level of care-home service being ‘provided’ by him. Being less kind, Al had no money to improve the homes: so he stole £15 billion from an existing NHS budget and misnamed it ‘a new dawn’ in aged care.

Burnham is mainly embroiled in this debate because the Aged Care Charities blew the whistle on the do-nothing Party three weeks ago. This went along the lines of asking “Er…where is this fifteen billion quid?”

To paraphrase the great and fondly remembered Nye Bevan, New Labour apparatchiks like Burnham are lower than vermin. (Especially when they use old people to launch their leadership campaigns).