Gordon Brown now claims to be a champion of the middle classes!

There's been nothing like it since the wolf dressed up as grandma in order to turn Little Red Riding Hood into pot-roast.

Gordon Brown now claims to be a champion of the middle classes. Apparently, only he can be trusted to look after their interests. And there were millions of us thinking that he was, in fact, the unreconstructed arch-enemy of the middle classes and of everything they hold dear.

For sheer unadulterated brazen gall, his pretence surely takes the latest of many mouldy digestive biscuits. Of course, we can all see the reason for this play-acting. After the recent failed coup against Brown, Lord Mandelson won his strategic battle to fight the election campaign on New Labour's territory of aspiration rather than as another front in Old Labour's failed class war.

In the circumstances, Brown had no alternative but to agree. Yet this is the man whose entire political persona rests upon constraining, punishing and extorting from the middle classes.

(PIC: Zed Jameson/NEWSPICS)