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New Labour used to be the dominant political force: now it has become a soap opera in which characters of varying credibility parade their starring roles in the big story before us.
For those of us who can still bear to watch it, recent episodes have been horribly compelling.
Yesterday, Chancellor Alistair Darling looked mutinous Labour back-benchers in the eye and blinked, with a full-scale reversal of the 10p tax fiasco set to swell the black hole in the public finances by £2.7 billion in order to compensate 22 million taypayers short-changed by his boss, the ex-Chancellor, last year.
Mr Darling has rarely been associated with undue excitements: now he presides over one of the biggest and most expensive U-turns in political history, unmatched since the retreat over fuel tax in 2000.
It is certainly a bold decision, albeit one taken in fear of Labour losing the plot (and next week's crucial by-election). Gordon Brown was in real danger of being written out of the script as an electable figure.
And what a tortuous script the Labour Party has become. John Prescott's memoirs confided regrets about bulimia and adulterous flings with a frankness that we usually expect only from royalty and rock stars.
Even he has since been scooped in the intimate detail by Cherie Blair's recollections of her contraceptive lapse that led to conceiving in Balmoral and of Mr Brown "rattling the keys" to Number 10 over a beleaguered Tony Blair.
One of the many cultural shifts in politics in the past decade is that the margin between a leader leaving office and revelations of the inner workings of his court has shortened to a matter of months for mainly commercial reasons.
It is thus virtually impossible for an orderly segue of power to take place without the skeletons of what has gone before tumbling out of the cupboard to the lasting discredit of the successor government. In the midst of his other woes, the PM is powerless to contend against an army of voluble ghosts. The Whips' influence does not extend to Valhalla.
So Mr Prescott, amid his doleful frankness about being the social odd man out among the college boys, shares ample detail of being stuck in the middle, between a leader using all his duplicitous wiles to hold on to power and an increasingly maddened Chancellor.
We have already had the full frenetically charged spinner's story of strife on the No 10 sofa from Alastair Campbell - and now Lord Levy who thinks Tony was "only in it for himself " (unlike all those people who pen exhaustive memoirs of their time in his service, obviously).
I doubt that many people will read any, let alone all of these accounts. But they do get the message from the accompanying headlines loud and clear.
Ten years in power is now treated as fodder for lucrative look-backs. By implication, any awareness of what New Labour means, let alone loyalty to it, is being consigned to the past. Either their authors are blind to the damage it causes, which I doubt, or they simply do not care any more.
I gather Mr Blair fought hard to prevent his wife's memoirs being published, including more damaging material about his relationship with the then Chancellor. Any more direct knife-wielding could easily rebound on the perpetrators.
All the main feuds (with the notable exception of real feelings about Iraq) are laid bare: Mr Prescott handily lists the things the two men disagreed on and included "city academies" in the inventory - so much for the recent pretence that Mr Brown was always a fan of one of the lasting changes Mr Blair did make to state education.
Worse still for Mr Brown, the Government has been beset by another tranche of Labour insiders who have decided that party discipline is now optional. I listened to the saintly Frank Field on the radio last week and for the first time in many years of nodding sagely when Frank dissed some malformed Treasury policy, felt queasy.
Mr Field told Radio 4's Any Questions? that he would keep on pushing Mr Brown to amend the last Budget exactly to his liking, with no room for compromise or manoeuvre. No party can thrive if its leader is held hostage by back-benchers, for whatever reason.
In fact Mr Field had erred badly in anticipating a complex and partial climbdown on the tax row, rather than the fully fledged retreat of yesterday.
He has redeemed himself in part with a gracious apology for allowing his earlier campaign to "become personal", but an experienced Westminster figure should surely have seen earlier that the main beneficiary of the latter stage of his campaign was the Conservative Party.
Even more bizarre is the emergence of junior figures who are establishing themselves as turbulent complainers before they have achieved anything even their mothers would remember.
We find junior health minister Ivan Lewis complaining regularly about the Government's performance and need to "get its act together" and "apologise" to voters. On what authority he speaks is wholly unclear. On behalf of the next generation (which will be pretty far gone after two Tory terms), James Purnell, the Pensions Secretary, enjoins Mr Brown's team to "get up off the floor". How grateful he must be for all the advice.
My sympathies for Mr Brown are limited, but his own party is putting him in an impossible position.
True, many old chickens are now flapping home to roost. He was unnecessarily abrasive and downright rude to many people around Mr Blair and they have no reason to be nice about him now. But the eternal verity stands. Parties which bask in their blood-feuds, whatever the pretext, repel the public.
The Conservatives learned that lesson and today present a united front, their schisms and doubts largely hidden from view. New Labour cannot shuffle off the past which created what it is today and neither can it come to terms with it. Whatever else it may resolve or achieve, the electorate will despise a party at war.
Reader views (1)
It isn't a full climb-down, Anne. It's a special measure for one tax year and many people are still going to be worse off.
Don't fall for New Labour spin.
- Mo, London, 14/05/2008 16:24
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