He also has to negotiate with the power whose legality and ethics he might be questioning. That allows for some creative tension – not least since the UN Charter empowers the Secretary General to raise issues before the Security Council.

Since the UN’s headquarters is in New York, there is an extra complication. Much of the world media takes its cue from the American media, whose editorial views of the organisation tend to be somewhat jaundiced. Even on the liberal wing of American politics, UN resolutions on the Middle East are depicted as prejudiced and preposterous. That the US can usually only muster a few dependent Pacific atolls to vote with it on Israel is seen as the rest of the world being out of step. On the right, they are more consistent. They question the very existence of the organisation – let alone American membership of it.

So when Ban Ki-moon took office, he had many strikes against him. He had a foreign accent: he was South Korea’s foreign minister, which prejudiced leftists against him almost as much as his support from George Bush and John Bolton. That did not help across the Democratic spectrum either. Conservatives regard any UN Secretary General with suspicion – even if their own administration had nominated him.

It did not help that South Korea is almost beyond the event horizon – in the depths of a geopolitical black hole, with China, Japan, the US and Russia surrounding it and an eccentric neighbour in Pyongyang necessarily taking up a lot of policy attention. This meant that, initially, Ban was prone to accept American and Israeli views of the Middle East.

He inadvertently damned himself in the early stages by joking that the Korean press corps used to call him “the slippery eel” for his skill in evading tough questions.

Other journalists did not notice his sense of humour. The stereotype stuck: Ban was an evasive, boring bureaucrat who did what he was told. The few, unflattering profiles of him were widely accepted as standard – even though one was from a neo-conservative who was unhappy that Ban had not lived up to Bolton’s expectations, while another was a leaked, tendentious report from a Norwegian diplomat who had not secured the UN job she wanted.

In fact, almost unnoticed, Ban has secured $10.5 million “reimbursement” for the damage the Israel Defence Forces did to UN facilities in Gaza. This is a first for the UN, whose premises have often been targeted, and it depended on maintaining relations with Israel even while standing up for UN principles.

Israeli ministers queue up to meet Ban, even though his statements are often far more forthright than his predecessors, “As far as Gaza is concerned, I was horrified by seeing what had happened to the UN and to many thousands of Palestinians”, he told me.

He has shown an attachment to principle that is inconsistent with the caricature. When he was running for office, I asked him about the International Criminal Court and the “responsibility to protect”. He could – and, by all the rules of diplomacy and elections, should – have prevaricated. He could have said he would implement UN decisions. He did not. He declared his unequivocal support for them even though Bolton had made it his sworn task to kill off the ICC.

I asked Ban about this last week and he remembered. “That was from my conviction. When I was foreign minister, I visited Rwanda and saw the Massacre Memorial. I was so saddened and horrified by what I saw. I was convinced the international community had to take steps to prevent anything like what had happened there. I wrote in the guest book that there must be no repetition of these crimes.”

He speaks to President Omar Bashir of Sudan to try to bring peace there, but when I asked about the ICC indictment, he replied: “The ICC case has given a very strong message to the international community, that there can never be – and will not be – any impunity. In that regard it created a very important message around the world.

“I believe in being straightforward with leaders, who are very difficult to deal with – regardless of whom – but I am still able to maintain relationships with them. Most of my senior advisors were quite surprised by how outspoken I was – because I was speaking from my own conviction.”

Indeed, last year, he told the US House of Representatives Foreign Relations Committee that the US was being a “deadbeat” about its UN dues, earning a rebuke even from the White House spokesman. But it was a closed meeting, from which a disgruntled congressman had leaked the comments, and the dues are now paid – making Ban the first solvent Secretary General for decades.

The lack of public profile is a mixed blessing. At least Rupert Murdoch’s minions have not yet been on his case yet. But Ban Ki-moon deserves more attention and support.

Last week, at the Chilcot inquiry, we were meant to find out whether Gordon Brown agreed Iraq was a disastrous war with a still bloody peace. Now we know that he believed: “It was the right war at the right time”. Yet does that answer the question – if he had been Prime Minister at the time, would Iraq have been his war? Now that Brown is Prime Minster, the central question is: would he embroil us in a war with Iran?

We know where his predecessor stands. Blair used the Chilcot inquiry to promote the idea that Western forces may need to invade Iran as it poses just as serious a threat as Saddam Hussein once did. So as not leave us in any doubt of his conviction, Blair mentioned Iran 58 times. Brown didn’t mention the country once.

Brown’s appearance at Chilcot was a testing time. Despite initially wanting the inquiry to be held in private – a misguided attempt to protect Blair’s reputation, perhaps – he had to give way to pressure and allow it be held in public.

Some commentators have derided the proceedings for being devoid of any new evidence, with panel members lacking the forensics skills to interrogate witnesses properly. Nevertheless, it has proved a complete narrative under the eye of the television cameras. In itself, this has made the proceedings valuable.

With an agenda set by the media and retired generals, Brown was pressed on whether, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had provided the military with adequate resources. If we can’t blame him for the war on Iraq, why don’t we blame him for starving the troops of funds?

It was a well-trailed question that was easy to answer and Brown did so when he told the inquiry: “I told [Tony Blair] I would not – and this was right at the beginning – try to rule out any military option on the grounds of cost. Quite the opposite. He should feel free, because this was the right course of action, to discuss the military option that was best for the country and the one that would yield the best results. We understood that some options were more expensive than others, but we should accept the option that is right for the country”.

This puts Blair back on the spot. After all, it was his war. If, as Prime Minister, he thought that his Chancellor wasn’t providing sufficient money for the military to do their job properly, why didn’t he just sack him? Were the so-called titanic battles between Brown and Blair that were, according to The Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley, a feature of their relationship, not apparent at times such as these?

Now Brown is on his own. He is locked into a war that he inherited. History tells us Afghanistan will turn out to be unwinnable. However, instead of abandoning this quagmire, Brown is committed to providing financial and moral support.

Meanwhile, with the Tories’ opinion poll lead evaporating, they are reduced to slinging mud around Brown’s visit to those serving in Afghanistan. This signals that the general election battle is being fought on the domestic front. Brown has seen off the fifth column in his own party. Despite, the best efforts of some in the media, coup attempts by erstwhile Blairites have failed to gain momentum. And Brown has dodged the bullets provided by defeatist members of the Government, who were keen to protect their own reputations in seeking out Rawnsley to snipe at the premier.

The Conservatives are not doing their reputations any favours. They are in turmoil over their ill-thought-out economic strategy and lack of judgement over Michael Ashcroft’s tax status. This shows that, when battle is joined, David Cameron can be easily unhorsed.

We can almost feel the despair of commentators in the Tory press as mistake after mistake is made by the Conservative high command. As Matthew D’Ancona in the Sunday Telegraph put it:  “I agree with those who say that the specifics of the Ashcroft case will be quickly forgotten. But the damage is already done. The process is incremental: the Deripaska affair and George Osborne’s yacht-fondling, Zac Goldsmith’s non-dom status, the Joanne Cash episode and Sir Nicholas Winterton’s declaration that standard-class rail passengers are ‘a totally different type of people’. Each story does a little more to confirm the voters’ residual fear that the Tory Party is a political front for a gang of people who want to govern so they can do what the hell they like.”

Labour is still in with a fighting chance at the election – of ending up as the largest party, at the very least. The electoral battleground, centred on the size the  £178 billion national deficit, may seem daunting. But such a debt is not unmanageable.

While Osborne and Cameron are losing credibility, the CBI and Institute of Directors are coming to their aid with a demand that the Government speed up “balancing the books”. Their arguments need to be countered.

But they had a point. The right-wing media deliberately and maliciously distorted events to suit the slant of their proprietors and their political friends of the day, who ranged from  Norman Tebbit to the SDP, but never any further left. And the process works the other way round. A Tory row can be covered up – a Conservative leader’s speech can be reported as if it was the Sermon on the Mount.

So it was at Brighton. David Cameron’s address to the faithful at his party’s Spring Forum was billed in advance as the speech of his life, the great launch pad for a Tory revival in the polls, a beacon of vision and policy in a darkening world…you get my drift. Actually, it wasn’t mine but the spin-doctors’ and, as is the way of these things, it was nothing of the sort. Dave’s spinners ought to grasp Charlie Whelan’s first law of manipulation, which is not to oversell an event because itnever lives up to the advance billing.

This was no exception. It wasn’t a particularly bad speech, but it wasn’t much good either. There was nothing new in it, policy-wise. The gimmick of speaking without notes has lost any of the glamour it might once have had. Applause was modest, rising to a standing ovation only when Cameron praised British troops in Afghanistan. There were a couple of warnings. “Change will be tough and hard”, he cautioned. On whom? I wondered. “If you can work and are offered work and choose not to work, you cannot go on having benefits as before”, he did his best to bellow in that reedy voice of his, as if the hall were full of workshy layabouts. Actually, there were probably quite a few – of the idle rich.

“Immigration has been too high for too long”, he squeaked. “It needs to be cut and I will cut it.” Strangely, there was no applause even for this iconic Tory message. Once, around the middle of his rehearsed text, Cameron even faltered, as though he didn’t know what came next. He quickly recovered his poise – he’s a past master at that – but his hesitation chimed with a sense of indecision among his audience.

That morning, the latest opinion poll had put the Tories only two points ahead of Labour – the smallest lead since Gordon Brown’s election-that-never-was and the onset of recession. Something like panic was in the late February air. How could this possibly have happened? This wasn’t how the script was supposed to run. Dapper Dave was supposed to be on course for a historic victory over the old enemy. Indeed, as the leader declared in a promo video screened at ear-splitting decibel levels before his showbiz entry: “Nothing and no one can stop us”. That arrogant assertion almost belonged to a previous age.

But you wouldn’t have gleaned any of the above from the television coverage of Cameron on the Sunday evening or in the friendly media next day. His speech was a triumph. He had actually admitted that the general election might be a tight-run thing – “a real battle” – which was no more than a statement of the bleeding obvious. The banal was raised to a rhetorical level. I must have been at a different conference to the rest of my colleagues. They had seen a masterly performance. I saw something hugely underwhelming. On the way out, I observed to a delegate: “Did I really come 250 miles to hear that?” And he did not demur.

What conclusions, if any, are there to be drawn from this experience? Well, it confirms my belief that most of the press and all of the mainstream electronic media – including (indeed, especially) the BBC – have made their minds up that Cameron will be Prime Minister on May 7 and they might as well start sucking up to him now. Always back a winner, as Rupert Murdoch would advise.

This attitude isn’t fundamentally political. Most of the Westminster Lobby don’t have much in the way of politics – and perhaps that’s a good thing. There’s not a lot of point in filling the place with people like me. But they do have a quite short attention span and Labour has exceeded that allotted period. The story has got stale. They’re bored with – or contemptuous of – the party’s main players in government. After 13 years of Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, who can blame them?

So what they really want is a new story, which means a new party and a new government. Cameron isn’t all that new – he’s been around for five years in different guises – but he’s a damn sight more of a novelty than Jack Straw. And there is a herd instinct. Once the leaders pick up a different scent, the rest of the pack follows in short order. This may make for more interesting newspaper and TV coverage of the election, but it will be hard for Brown and company to overcome this mood shift when they present their bid for a fourth term of power. As for me, it looks like I will be at a different election from the rest of the gang.

That he, or his predecessor William Hague, whose patronage ensured Lord Ashcroft’s peerage, were simply gullible stretches belief. As Lord Tebbit put it: “It would have been better if Ashcroft said what we now know years ago.”

For years, Lord Ashcroft allowed people to believe that he had changed his tax status in line with the assurances he gave in order to secure his peerage when in fact he hadn’t. His emphatic silence throughout testifies to the fact that he knew he was not playing straight with the Government, Parliament, his own party or the electorate. Wanting it both ways, he was prepared to claim domiciled status to attain and retain his peerage but non-domiciled status to avoid paying taxes in the country whose political affairs he is in a position to preside over.

This is a man who has been prepared to have as decisive an influence as possible over which government we have but was unprepared to pay the taxes that should have been due to the Exchequer. A man who is prepared to bankroll a party set on savage cuts in the living standards, job prospects, education and health of people and a country for which he has displayed a contemptuous and cynical disrespect.

Far from censuring Lord Ashcroft and ordering him to put his affairs in order – as he did with Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for Richmond who was also revealed to be a non-dom – David Cameron merely says it is right that the air has been cleared and expects to draw a line swiftly under the affair. That should not be allowed to happen. When the Electoral Commission ruled that Lord Ashcroft was free to channel funds from overseas into the British political system, it exposed the inadequacy of the present rules.

There is no honour in the coincidence of gaining a peerage and being a donor, non-dom, or not, to a political party. Labour peer Lord Paul went some way to addressing his own status by declaring that he would pay full taxes in future. While he and other donors are not directly influencing policy and, unlike Lord Ashcroft, are not at the heart of the party machine, they represent a discredited system of party financing which must be changed and better regulated. Yet it is the Tories, in another act of hypocrisy, which blocked all party talks on reform because they wanted to cut off union funding of Labour – the most transparent and regulated of any form of political donations.

If Michael Ashcroft is the unacceptable face of the Tory Party, David Cameron has proved once again that he is its deeply flawed leader.

There is an enduring affection, respect and admiration felt for him, not least by the labour movement. He was a legendary orator, a thoughtful historian and a brilliant writer.

His words made an impression far beyond politics.

I will always be grateful for the help and support he gave me after we first campaigned together at the Beaconsfield by-election. We met in a pub and I started asking him about PG Wodehouse, an interest we shared. It wasn’t a typical Labour leader meets Labour candidate moment. It was also his support which stood me in very good stead when I sought the Sedgefield nomination about a year later.

Although in some ways Michael was never best suited to lead the party organisation when it was in such turmoil in the early 1980s, he was and remains an inspirational leader for the party’s values and beliefs. It was Michael’s leadership at the toughest of times which meant the Labour Party survived and went on to lead our country again. We owe him a debt of honour and an honoured place in the history of our party.

Imagine my surprise, then, when last Wednesday, about half an hour after Michael’s death had been announced, on The World At One, the two people the BBC deemed most appropriate to give an immediate comment were… David Owen and Tony Benn. Admittedly, their contributions weren’t as nauseating as David Cameron’s later that day, but only marginally less so. For anyone who knew Michael – which I had the immense privilege of doing for the last 18 years or so of his life – choosing the two men who’d effectively destroyed his leadership of the Labour Party to sing his encomia might appear to be the final revenge of the Establishment he despised, but I suspect it was simply down to sloppy journalism (which he also abominated). Anyway, both Benn and Owen (who Michael really, truly loathed) stuck to the approved script, confirming that, with his death we had lost the greatest orator of a now bygone political age. They also agreed (again, sticking to the official line) that he was a fundamentally decent man, perhaps too decent to be an effective leader. We know how both of them repaid his decency, but nonetheless neither was wrong – although neither was entirely right either.

Because merely garlanding him as a great orator doesn’t do Michael justice. Certainly, he was great speaker – the noise of his voice alone, quite apart from what he said, was capable of being both inspiring and deeply comforting – but then again Hitler, to give him his due, was a pretty effective orator, as have been countless demagogues throughout history. But Michael was the very opposite of a demagogue, just as he was the antithesis of the kind of neurotically sanitised and manicured politics embodied by “new” Labour or David Cameron. And that’s because he was on our side.

By that, I don’t mean that he was narrowly on the side of a small arc of the left, or of the Labour Party more generally (although I sometimes despaired at his loyalty – manifested through muteness – towards Labour’s latest mutation, just as his older friends despaired at his loyalty to avatars of Lucifer such as Lord Beaverbrook or Enoch Powell). He was on the side of humanity. Infinitely lovable himself, he recognised that, in general, people as a whole are lovable and deserve much better than they usually get. As I say, he was our side.

So it came as no surprise when he once told me that he considered his greatest achievement in the politics of government to have been the setting up of the Health and Safety Executive. Like his friend and fellow Welsh MP Leo Abse, who added to the real, quantifiable sum of human happiness by masterminding legislation on divorce, adoption and homosexual law reform, he’d achieved something which genuinely improved lives, far more than any amount of great oratory.

But, for my money, his greatest political achievement lay in the rest of his long political life, the years as a serial rebel, because there, too, he was on our side. And that’s because the best part of politics is and always has been not in seeking to usurp power, but in trying to thwart it, by harrying it, obstructing it and, most of all, mocking it. Because Michael was always on the side of the satirists as well – be they Dean Swift and William Hazlitt or his erstwhile colleague, George Orwell, or his great friend, the cartoonist Vicky. Or cartoonists in general, whom he appreciated, admired and supported more completely than any other politician I can think of. As he once said to me, with a mischievous cackle, the thing the Labour leadership hated most about Tribune was the cartoons.

And that mischievousness – his sense of fun – is something else which placed him firmly on our side and which imbued him, even in great age, with a defining youthfulness. He was the youngest old man I’ve ever known, and displayed it over and over again, whether through the twinkle in his one good eye, his barking laugh or his standard form of greeting, which remained that weird, clenched fisted, arm-wrestling Commie handshake.

The last time I saw Jill, a few months before her death in 1999, she told me that, at heart, she and Michael were William Morris socialists. In short, they believed in fun for all. So it’s worth repeating Walter Pater’s line about Morris: “To burn always with that hard, gem-like flame is success in life.” Which will do very nicely. Because, whatever glib and amnesiac political commentators might say, Michael’s life – in and out of politics – was a triumphant success. And although, like me, he had no time for extra-dimensional ideas of life after death, the affection he inspired, for all the reasons I’ve given above, means his life, in our hearts and minds, still has a long way to run. It was a joy to know, not just the politician, but also the man.

I feel a sense of almost saint-like righteousness as I utter that phrase. It alone is touché to the planet-bothering fraternity. I am on the side of good and the angels.

Although, to be honest, the minutia of this sacrifice doesn’t bear too much scrutiny. I had a car and I hated it. It used to sit outside and send me bills. Besides, a man of my thirst is ill-advised to venture out in the evening in control of a motor vehicle. And even if I could find a space, I couldn’t afford to park in central London. Sometimes the car took us to the supermarket, but mostly it just rusted. Plus there’s a tube a 10-minute walk away and two all-night buses pass the end of the street.

I also have a recycling bin, which means empty bottles don’t crowd the kitchen. So I like to think I’m doing my bit.

Better still, I manage to look virtuous while making no personal effort or sacrifice. That’s what I call a result.

Then, suddenly last week, my world was darkened. We had a power cut. The electricity went off in five flats, thrusting its occupants, myself included, into the Dark Ages. No, even earlier. We entered a primeval existence.

It wasn’t long before I heard the wailing of the neighbours. Edie, gaunt and frail, leaned on the rail of the balcony and said she hadn’t been able to boil the kettle. She hadn’t had a cup of tea for an hour and a half. Sue lamented the loss of the contents of her freezer (probably a tin of cat food and an empty tin of Tennents) in uncompromising terms. Mrs B, the posh one, said she was having guests to dinner and the wine wouldn’t be chilled properly, ignoring the fact that it was freezing.

“But if there’s no electricity, you won’t have any food to give them”, I pointed out.

“Then the wine will have to be perfect.”

To escape the despondent air, I went into my rapidly-chilling premises, saying I’d make a few calls. I picked up the cordless phone to find it didn’t work without electricity. That was when it began to dawn on me how utterly dependent we are on the stuff.

The electricity goes off and the central heating doesn’t come on. There’s nothing to charge up your phones, laptops and iPods. The pump in the goldfish’s tank stops and it’s instantly lying on its back, gasping. No kettle, no telly, no clothes washer, no light. There are candles somewhere at the nether end of the pitch-black cupboard under the stairs. Your fate lies in the hand of the electricity people. And they’re French.

Well, mine are. I get my bills from the EDF, the Electricité de France. The French have wrestled control of London’s electricity supply. If we ever cheese them off again, they won’t have to invade. They can just cut off our electricity and we’ll be garlic butter in their hands.

When I was young, we were on a coin meter, so we were plunged into darkness on a regular basis. Each time, it took on the air of a French farce. Someone trod on the dog that took a nip at Harry who spilled his tea into someone’s lap. The rest of us all edged our way in the blackness feeling through each other’s pockets for shillings or anything else useful or with an exchange value. There was a theoretical supply of shilling coins hidden in the kitchen. Not well hidden enough, though.

Losing the lecky was part of the life experience, like the monster spider in the outside toilet, the hypochondriac canary that needed to be revived with brandy and Uncle Harry’s pig and habit of paring his toenails in front of the fire with an industrial rasp. His own toenails, not the pig’s.

Today a power cut is a much more sober affair. We’ve become electricity junkies. Fifteen minutes after a fix, we’re screaming for more. We’re so dependent that, when the electricity went off, I switched off, too. I went to bed. It’s like I’m connected to the national grid. As soon as there’s a hiccup in my supply, I cease to function.

This is all really serious, because the only alternatives are to produce more electricity or cut down the amount we use. If it’s a case of having a Sellafield clone in the garden or developing my own strategies for power saving, like hiding Edie’s kettle, then I’m turning green (which I suppose I would anyway with a Sellafield in the garden). We’ll have to slow down, take more time off, relax and enjoy life. Sounds a bit 1960s, I know, but it’s the best we can do.

Did I mention I don’t have a car?

As lurid allegations concerning Gordon Brown have filled newspapers over the past few weeks, there seems to be an indecent haste applied to the past by the media. Members of the Thatcher Foundation seem to be the only people observing any three-decade purdah these days: recently throwing light on the Iron Lady’s pre-1979 general election diet.

The much-missed Spitting Image had an influence on politics in the 1980s, with its satirical take on a decade of record unemployment, the miners’ strike and the beginnings of yuppie culture. The fate of the SDP-Liberal alliance was allegedly sealed by the use of latex puppets of their two leaders – with a tiny David Steel in the pocket of David Owen, although the former was actually the taller of the two. While Spitting Image was clearly a joking matter, with the more recent vogue for docu-drama, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. This was apparent in BBC 4’s On Expenses, which had television columnists straying into political commentary. This “Expensesgate” comedy pillorying former Speaker Michael Martin shows that deference for politicians is no more. We live in times of “accelerated” culture when ongoing events are dramatised for laughs.

When the actor playing investigative journalist Ben Leapman, who broke the scandal, first appeared onscreen, I felt compelled to text Ben, a friend at university, that I’d just seen “him” on telly – although the genuine article is much better-looking than the actor. Leapman himself has written in the Daily Telegraph about being played by someone else – adding that he has never owned a duffel coat.

Margaret Thatcher has had her early political career turned into drama in The Long Road to Finchley. There was also a TV play about the events leading to her resignation.

Notwithstanding Tony Blair at the Chilcot inquiry again demonstrating his superlative acting skills, the former Prime Minister has been fictionalised more than most. The Deal was about his pact with Gordon Brown. There has also been the feature film The Queen and Channel 4’s The Trial of Tony Blair.

What next – a comedy special reprising the “bullygate” row? Brown’s pledge to “fight every inch of the way” takes on whole new meaning. Again, the recent fracas highlights the difficulties in distinguishing fact from fiction. Brown’s TV tears were surreal enough, but we don’t really have much evidence when it comes to the allegations of his shortcomings. Walking hurriedly past someone on the stairs hardly constitutes threatening behaviour.

The story that some Number 10 staffers had telephoned an anti-bullying helpline soon began to take on the hallmarks of a plot to spread anti-Labour poison as more details emerged. When Ann Widdecombe resigned as trustee, it hastened the demise of the charity  its phone line was briefly suspended last wekk.

Channel 4’s Tower Block of Commons, in which some MPs volunteered to live in social housing for a week, has also had a hand in bringing politics to people’s front rooms. I was glued to the series, which featured the spectacle of a rapping Tory frontbencher, Tim Loughton. Labour’s Austin Mitchell discovered that his wife had suffered from depression as a young mother, when she empathised with a heroin-addicted estate-dweller. We also saw Tory Nadine Dorries put on a Somali costume to gather support for a community barbecue, leading to a strange exchange on a stairwell. Member of the public: “Are you a Muslim?” Dorries: “No, I’m an MP.”

The MPs almost turned into cartoon characters. There was clearly some trickery going on, too. It was hard to believe that the lads who jeered at Liberal Democrat Mark Oaten for his rent boy indiscretions would have known about that episode in his past without some prompting.

Whether we are talking about dramas concerning the likes of Winnie Mandela, Mo Mowlam, David Blunkett and Dr David Kelly or reality TV featuring politicians, it is apparent that we live in an age of hyper-reality where fiction and reality are blurring. This confirms the view of postmodernist sociologists who talk of that accelerated culture where the past catches up with us at a dizzying pace.

When French philosopher Jean Baudrillard declared that the first Gulf war had never happened, referring to the numbing effect of the highly mediated coverage of that conflict, it seemed like a pretentious statement about distant events. Now the observation seems apposite.

The 30-year rule was always difficult to justify in a climate of freedom of information. Let’s hope the revised version is a success.

Rupa Huq blogs at www.rupahuq.co.uk

We’ve seen it in recent local by-elections, too, where Labour has been winning back council seats. And it’s now being reflected in the opinion polls, which have been narrowing month by month.

The shift in the polls and rising trust ratings for Labour on the economy can be traced back to the Pre-Budget Report in December, when Alistair Darling set out to the country how we will secure the recovery fairly and the clear choice with the Conservatives.

Labour’s approach is to steadily reduce the deficit once the recovery has been secured and halve it in four years, invest in growth and jobs for the future, fair tax rises and protecting frontline investment in schools, hospitals and the police. In sharp contrast, the Tories are still embracing the “Treasury view” of the 1930s and the Thatcherite economics of the 1980s that cutting spending immediately is the only option, and seem willing to put growth and jobs at risk to do so.

People are now looking at this choice and rejecting the Tory decade of austerity. So when David Cameron keeps saying: “Vote for change”, voters are rightly starting to ask what sort of change. And they are asking whether Cameron’s change is a change they and their families can afford.

It’s clear to me that the reason why the Tories – with their Notting Hill crisis meetings last week – are starting to wobble and panic is not just their shrinking poll lead. It’s because they’ve been rumbled. They’ve been found out.

Cameron’s strategy was clear – to talk about change, glide through to the general election without scrutiny and get a mandate by stealth. He hoped that “Time for a change” would be a loud enough cry, without people ever stopping to ask what kind of change.

However, as my opposite number Michael Gove recently said about the need for the Tories to select a few more women, black and minority ethnic candidates to try to give the appearance that the Conservative Party has changed: “Like a conjuror, we’ll get more applause if the audience cannot see exactly how the trick is performed”.

Cameron and the Tories thought they could just coast into office through warm words on camera – and keep their real plans off camera. But the British people are a bit smarter, and rightly more sceptical, than that. They’ve seen the smoke and mirrors. The illusion is slowly being shattered. This strategy of airbrushing and concealment is no longer working.

We saw a great example of this strategy on Sunday when Gove was a guest on the BBC’s Politics Show. Even though I was on the same programme that afternoon, he refused to debate with me.

But the fact is the Tories are finding it increasingly hard to duck the difficult questions. As voters – followed by some parts of the media – have started to ask those questions in recent weeks, the Tories have been found wanting.

We’ve seen it week after week on some of their flagship policies – from marriage tax breaks to how far to cut public spending this year to their free-market schools experiment, which saw standards fall and inequality rise when it was tried in Sweden.

We saw it on Monday this week when the billionaire Tory donor and vice-chairman Lord Ashcroft finally admitted his true tax status that he concealed for 10 years. And, in their desperate attempt to talk our country down and paint Britain as broken, with dodgy statistics on violent crime and teenage pregnancies, the Tories have been well and truly caught out.

So we will keep asking those questions. Why put the recovery at risk by ignoring the international consensus with immediate cuts in spending? Why is cutting inheritance tax for millionaires still their priority? And, as I wrote in this column last month, why do they want to take Sure Start, tax credits and child trust funds away from families on modest and middle incomes?

Of course, we cannot simply rely on the Conservatives collapsing for us to win this election. We have to stand on and defend our record. And we have to set out a positive vision for a fair future  – including one-to-one tuition for children falling behind, an education or training place for all young people up to the age of 18 and our one-week cancer guarantee.

But since all these policies are opposed by David Cameron’s Tories, we must set out the choice on the doorsteps, in workplaces and at school gates. Do we secure the recovery or put it at risk? Do we support new industries and future jobs or threaten an age of austerity? Do we protect frontline services such as schools, Sure Start, and the police or do we cut them?

I believe this will be the most important general election in a generation. There is a lot at stake. In the coming weeks, we must step up the fight and set out the choice, because this is an election we can win.

Ed Balls is Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families and Labour and Co-operative MP for Normanton

“Raising educational standards for all” is a mantra used by all three main political parties, but the key question they need to answer is how. It is essential that politicians understand the current position. As things stand, all schools manage themselves and have done so since 1988 when Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced local management. Local authorities have powers to intervene, but only in specific circumstances – such as when a school fails an Ofsted inspection. Academy schools have much the same powers as any other school, except when it comes to admissions. The choices they are able to make reduce parental ones. Allowing all schools to become academies would not raise standards and would be unpopular with many Tory-controlled councils. And what will be the solution to a failing academy school? In fact, standards in most schools have been rising every year for some time, although it seems the Conservative Party has yet to realise this.

The Tories say they want to follow the Swedish example and allow anyone to set up a new school. This is a diversion. The reality is that any group of parents in this country who want set up a school are able to do this under existing legislation. There are few instances of this.

What is emerging from the Conservatives is a collection of rather odd ideas. Most centre on schools and there is little reference to policies relating to adults, further education or the skills agenda.

The grants for poorer 16-19-year-old students, introduced by Labour in 2001, would be abolished under the Tories. This is in spite of the success of these grants in improving the recruitment and retention of students from poorer backgrounds.

The Tories would take away the right of parents to appeal against their child being expelled from school. In consequence, the courts would be far more likely to become involved in such cases.

According to the Tories, examinations have become easier. Presumably they want to make them more difficult, which suggests that more students would get lower grades.

There are hints that university fees will rise considerably. If that happens, the cost of loans will increase and the target of 50 per cent of young people being able to go to university will not be reached.

The Tories say it is essential to increase parental choice. However, that can only be accomplished by increasing the number of surplus places in schools. And that is an expensive solution.

Teachers’ pay and conditions would be left to individual schools to decide. No one should be surprised if the number of cases referred to employment tribunals increases as a result.

The Conservatives seem wedded to the idea of a separation between academic courses and vocational ones, in spite of many employers arguing that this is outmoded in the 21st century.

While school budgets have increased considerably under Labour, a David Cameron government would probably seek to cut back on new school building programmes. And, for some inexplicable reason, the Tories want to scrap Sure Start.

Although they have pledged to spend more money on adult education, the Tories do not seem to realise the full seriousness of the situation. More than 20 per cent of adults have literacy or numeracy problems.

Thanks to Labour, primary school classes are now smaller and limited to 30 pupils from ages five to seven. There are a record number of teaching assistants in schools. Britain’s teachers are now among the best paid in Europe. Exam results are getting better every year at every level. Early years provision has been greatly improved and the new diplomas are opening up new opportunities for 14-19-year-olds in terms of job prospects and the development of essential skills.

On all this, the Tories are strangely quiet. Their policies are dominated by their schools agenda and they seem keen to end the strategic involvement of local government in education. In contrast, Labour is stressing the importance of lifelong learning and the different needs of adults at different times in their lives. Education has to be about much more than what we do before we go to work. It has to be available to people throughout their lives in both formal and informal settings.

The 2010 election gives Labour the chance to stress the significant differences between the parties and show why people should continue to trust Labour as the party that believes in educational opportunities for everyone.

Graham Lane is a former chair of the Local Government Association’s education committee