Remember that 'hugely popular' smoking ban? The one which Labour implemented, in contravention of their 2005 general election manifesto commitment to a partial ban, with which everyone would have been quite happy?
The ban which was unprecedented and revolutionary, in fact.
A smokefree England will see the single biggest improvement in public health for a generation
Caroline Flint
The Labour spin doctors' mantra was repeated faithfully elsewhere too.
The smoking ban in England is the "single most important public health legislation for a generation", Health Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
Not only was it so staggeringly welcome, it will also reverse the veritable holocaust of passive smoking's slaughter of the innocents.
The smokefree legislation could prevent 40,000 people dying over the next decade, it added.
Yes, we know that's all bollocks, but it's the line that Labour have been trotting out these past two years or so.
You would think, therefore, would you not, that Gordon Brown would have included it in the list of towering Labour achievements in his speech yesterday, instead of throwing in a few which were a bit dodgy and nothing to do with Labour.
Not even a passive whiff of it, though. Why not?
Could it be anything to do with the fact that Labour are being hammered in their northern heartlands, wiped out in Wales, and rejected by formerly party faithful Londoners?
It is the ground-breaking, genocide-preventing, generational miracle which dare not speak its incontestably-popular name.
And Brown confirmed yesterday that whatever Labour say in public about their destruction of the working class smoker's leisure time, privately they know that vast swathes of their usual core vote despise them for it.
Shhhhhh.
