All I can say is that when I had come out of my faint, and read what Greg was saying, I saw, naturally, that he was absolutely right. In spite of all… - Polly Toynbee

The Labour question is always the same – how far can you go and still bring enough voters with you? As Labour’s divide deepens, those of us not supporting Corbyn have been assailed as "neoliberal", "siding with the elite", "betraying the poor", "hypocrite" and worse. Like many Labour people, free to dream I’d go further than Corbyn: I’d go for a windfall wealth tax to pay off the deficit, make the Queen be Elizabeth the Last, abolish faith schools, private schools and inheritance, tax millionaires at 70%: add your wishlist here. I don’t know how far you can go – but you have to win power to get anywhere at all. Once in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further than you dare tread in opposition.

Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and 'elf 'n' safety fascism. In an ideal Polly Toynbee world, private sector broadcasting would be banned, Rupert Murdoch would be nationalised, and the BBC would hire thousands more taxpayer-funded social affairs correspondents to psalm the benefits of social democracy.

In so far as New Labour has a fairy godmother, Polly is the girl. She incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair's Britain.