Getting forgetful

ONLY 13 Labour MPs attended, but the fact that Sky News and BBC News 24 covered it live meant it was beamed into my living room when I really should have been trying to catch up with Phil and Fern on This Morning.

I'm talking about this bizarre 2020 vision thing which Alan Milburn, he who makes a great play of representing a down-at-hell constituency in the North East, and Norfolk's answer to Shrek - Charles Clarke, launched yesterday morning. Cue sighs at Sky News and News 24 as another half hour of television was filled easily.

Both - Clarke and Milburn, not the news channels - insist it's a chance to kick about ideas about future Labour policy via the internet to make sure Labour has a purpose for the next decade.

It's not, they say, a ploy to flush out some Blarite candidate to stand against Gordon Brown. Which is just as well really, because any politician who can properly read public opinion - rules out David Blunkett then - will know that standing on the Blairite ticket in the current anti-Tone climate will generate a similar reaction to Michael Barrymore promoting swimming pools.

But if they do both desire a non-Brown successor to Blair, then why not say so? Brown isn't stupid, he knows who his friends are, and surely Milburn won't be hoping for a way back in? And Charles Clarke? Too frank, too often, about Brown, me thinks, to think he can find a way back in.

Because, as I've said before, it's wrong for Labour to assume it can just pick a new prime minister for the country. It should pick a new leader, then go to the polls. And for the Labour Party itself, it is arrogant for Blair to engineer some sort of succession. That's not how it works. A realistic challenger is needed, not John McDonnell, to come and have a go with Brown.

I dare say Brown will be our next PM, and I certainly plan to vote for him ahead of Cameron if that is the case, but Brown will be all the stronger if he has fought off a real competitor for the top job. As Michael Howard will be only too happy to tell him.

But seeing as Milburn - who, I've always found, has the sort of demeanor when being interviewed which suggests he thinks he's only one question away from having a secret revealed - wants to focus on policies, lets do just that.

He wants policies to take Labour forward. I say this: How about getting the original policies sorted first.

During his tenure as health secretary, he pledged Alzheimer drugs for all who needed them, a decision now rescinded by NICE, the government body which rations drugs on the basis of cost.

If Mr Milburn - who seems to love power but not real responsibility - really wants people to take his attempt at debating future policies seriously, perhaps he needs to try a little harder at ironing out where the current ones have gone wrong.

Perhaps then such fringe press conferences, which didn't even flicker on the radars of most Labour MPs, will be worth the coverage they got on the UK's rolling news channels.