It would not be an easy job to rank the ministers in the last Labour government in order of vileness. Phil Woolas has a strong claim to be near the top of the league.

He’s been complaining that the party’s anti immigrant policies did not get the attention they deserved. Things like driving immigrants to starvation level by denying them benefits or making them homeless would have been sure fire vote winners he reckons. He’s not the only one. According to the report leadership contenders Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and David Miliband have been saying that by not doing their immigrant bashing energetically enough Labour lost working class votes.

A counter intuitive approach that these characters could have considered would have been building council homes for the voters who felt tempted to desert them. In any case the results seem to show that there was return of working class voters to Labour as a defensive reflexive. It was their more affluent supporters who defected to the Lib Dems.

One of Woolas’ quotes which shows the inner man’s fear of the Tory press has him saying:

"We also came under attack from the rightwing press, so when tabloids saw we were going on the front foot about immigration, they attacked us day after day, saying the system was not working."

Complaining that the right wing press is bigoted he concludes that the only sensible response is to give the Daily Mail what it wanted. Labour was lucky to have such courageous leadership. It gets worse. He bleats that people hadn’t really understood that when Gordon Brown nicked the BNP slogan “British jobs for British workers” he meant it.

Labour has enjoyed something of a membership surge in the days since the election as people start looking for something to protect them against the impending storm. Which the like of Balls, Woolas and the Miliband’s nicking the BNP’s rhetoric a good showing by John McDonnell would go some way to retaining a shred of the party’s dignity.