Say what you like about Starmer, McSweeney and Mandelson, but they have done more in under two years to destroy British labourism than the combined efforts of revolutionary Marxists over a century.

Mandelson might be in the process of being cast into the outer darkness, perhaps as a prelude to being cast into a prison cell but his methods continue to flourish. Voters in Tower Hamlets have been getting a leaflet illustrated with the shiftiest known photo of Mayor Lutfur Rahman. It is designed to look like a local newsletter and has more than a passing resemblance to the council’s monthly newspaper. The one thing it does not look like is what it actually is – Labour Party election material. You only find this out by using a microscope capable of showing a font the size of a sub-atomic particle.

Readers are directed to a website written in the tone of a Daily Heil article describing a street with a Turkish barber and a vape shop. The gist of it is that the borough is on its way to becoming a crime ridden hellhole in which the streets are filled with rubbish and rats feasting in overflowing bins. It offers you the chance to sign one of those SWP style petitions which guarantees follow up emails, phone calls and maybe even a knock on the door, albeit without an invitation to spend Saturday morning outside a supermarket flogging a paper.

Not for them Marx’s insistence that “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.” Trotsky’s demand that “The revolutionary party must tell the truth to the masses” hasn’t been a big influence on their thinking either.

Much of what is online about Tower Hamlets is malicious, far right racist nonsense. Musk’s Grokipedia’s entry on the borough is little more than a summary of it and the majority of X users commenting on the area are racists in favour of ethnic cleansing.

The facts, figures and opinions in the Labour materials are all fair political commentary, but misleadingly labelled materials feel like a tributary of the same stream. The mayor’s election campaign is distributing a leaflet describing the place as a perfect Nirvana. My own view is that it’s neither Gotham City nor a workers’ paradise but is a decent place to live. (That might be my election slogan.)

Tower Hamlets Labour’s need to create the appearance of a phony community campaign rather than produce things is hardly a mystery. One of their local MPs, a former homelessness minister, seems to have been abducted by aliens following a sordid episode in which she chucked tenants out of a property she was renting so she could get more rent. Then of course when your leader is Keir Starmer you aren’t going to be plastering his mug on your literature. This is a man who has been humiliated by Kemi Badenoch every day this week.

Dissembling and pretending that there is an independent anti-Rahman groundswell is a technique that distinguished political moralist Mandelson would approve of. It might feel like clever politics when you are doing it, but the evidence is that it destroys you in the end.

Mandelson, McSweeney and those who sold their souls to them will soon have time enough to reflect on that.