It used to be said that the Church of England was just the Conservative Party at prayer, although reading Robert Jackson’s stated reasons for crossing the floor you’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘New Labour’ was little more than the political wing of the Anglican Church.

Jackson may well be sincere in the beliefs that led him into the New Labour fold but that doesn’t stop me feeling slightly queasy about his name-checking everything from Methodism to the Book of Common Prayer in his article. On the whole it reads more like an application for a verger’s position and St. Albion than an overview of his political beliefs.

Students of history will no doubt find a delicious irony or two in his article. He comments on the influence of ‘Catholic - Anglican and Roman - social thinking’ on the Labour Party, forgeting that the Act of Settlement still prohibits Roman Catholics from ascending to the British Throne, or the PM’s job for that matter. However the real curio in this article is that in espousing the virtues of ‘New Labour’ and trying, through thinly veiled allusions to the ‘New Jerusalem’ of Kier Hardie, to wrap himself in the cloth of the Labour movement, he comes across as nothing more or less than an good old fashioned, died in the wool ‘one nation Tory’.

I wonder if that’s what Tony really meant by ‘unremittingly’ New Labour?