We are being bombarded by good-old-Footie obits at the moment. The Slogger can’t be doing with it.

There is something about dying that instantly sanctifies most people, but I’ve no idea why. The survivors get all misty-eyed, tell tedious anchors and roving reporters what a gem the corpse was, and then offer a telling smile in memoriam.

Michael Foot was a classic example of the privileged intellectual socialist who was wrong about almost everything in his life. His election to the leadership of the Labour Party represented the final proof that the Party had lost its senses, and doomed the Left to yet more years as a noisily wriggling but completely ineffective Opposition.

Harriet Harman is the carrier of the bonkers torch in New Labour. She comes from the same landed lunatic background as Foot and his contemporary Lord Longford, to whom she was related. More out of touch with the dreams of ordinary people than any nineteenth century shires Tory, separately and severally Harman, Foot and their ilk have replaced the genuinely practical Labour aims of yesteryear with the dictatorship of the ‘ist’: from pacifist Ban-the-Bomb piffle in the 1970s to feminist Ban the Blokes madness in the Naughties.

Eccentric and lovable they may be for some, but bitter experience teaches every fan of radical governance that they should not be allowed anywhere near power of any kind.