Whilst the remnants of New Labour run around like headless chickens in the face of the Jeremy Corbyn steamroller, the new Tory government is pressing on with left wing nostrums which would have delighted even Stalin. I refer to jailing landlords for up to five years if they fail to evict families from their properties when told by the government that these people have failed in their application for asylum. So if you are a private landlord you have to turn up on a cold night and throw onto the street a mother, three young children and a crying baby with a chest infection. And if human compassion prevents you from carrying out these heartless instructions, you make yourself liable to imprisonment of unusual severity for what amounts to a regulatory offence.
Of course I have taken the logic of this policy to an extreme conclusion that even the Tories would shrink from; not least because all private landlords vote for them. But that is where the policy leads if you follow it through. This is the point. There is beginning to emerge a whiff of a government whose talk does not match the action and the action fails to take account of the consequences. The stark fact of thirty miles of blocked motorway causing the suspension of normal life in East Kent because all the byways became jammed too, preventing access to work, school and shops, produced no more than a flurry of COBRA meetings and a promise of sniffer dogs and fencing. None of the underlying problems of the diaspora of desperate people described by Cameron as a swarm, which struggle across the Mediterranean in waterlogged boats, from a string of failed states in which the West is the chief architect of their collapse, are being tackled with any degree of competence likely to inform a resolution.
If you delve into the benefits system, the NHS and Homecare, affordable housebuilding, power generation, the courts, the prisons and loads of other areas in which the government is the authority or the paymaster, you will find dysfunction and demoralisation. At the moment Ted Heath is back in the news for the wrong reasons. But it is an apt message to remind us that his government fell because it lost control of events. Cameron has not yet lost control, but he is no longer in control. That is a dangerous place to be. To get out of it will need more than posh words.