Labour are busy with their latest Dead Cat (as I gather it is known in the trade) strategising.

The Dead Cat plan is simple.

You identify a scrap of bad meat somewhere near your opponent’s house.

Then start screaming at the top of your voice that your opponent has a dead cat lying there horribly on his doorstep.

Numerous media folk being either in your pocket or stupid then rush to your opponent’s house and start looking for the Dead Cat. They doorstep said opponent:

  • how do you feel about having a dead cat on your doorstep?
  • why was it there?
  • are you specifically denying on the record that you had such a dead cat there?
  • does not that dead cat show that your much vaunted doorstep hygiene policy is utterly discredited?

And so on.

It does not matter what the opponent says. He has been ‘framed’. The public, blankly gazing at the TV as they eat their plastic dinners somehow take in only this: Opponent = dead cat problem = ugh.

This aggressive strategy also has the great benefit of distracting public attention from the malodorous dead horse lying on your own doorstep.

So here they go again.

David Miliband who might be thought to have more taste and judgement babbles on again about ‘sickening’ Tory links to European extremists.

And now that the Irish have been bludgeoned into submission by the EU mainstream, the Tories are in Turmoil over Europe.

Yes, folks.

The dead cat we are pointed to is that the Conservatives have promised people a vote on the Lisbon Treaty – and maybe even are minded to give them that vote if the Treaty has not been finally ratified! Putrid!

Let’s all focus on that.

And not on the rotting dead horse of broken Labour promises on this very subject, and the machinations of the Labour super-elite to get themselves lots of top Euro-jobs once the Treaty comes into force. 

The strange thing is that democracy once was the quintessence of civilisation, based on sophisticated philosophical ideas of responsibility and honesty.

We are now reduced to whose imaginary ex-cat stinks the most.

Decline? May I introduce Fall?