YOU MAY think that the Comedy Conservatives broke new ground this week by turning a joke about autism into the main debating point at a political conference. New Labour, however, is still ahead in the laughing-stock stakes. Ministers now appear to base their health policies on jokes they have overheard — and, inevitably, failed to get.

Nursing Standard magazine has revealed how Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, told a fringe meeting at the Labour conference that pregnant teenagers now smoke to try to reduce the size of their babies, in order to make delivery less painful. This has sparked up an earnest debate, with Ms Flint saying that young women must be educated to learn that “smoking is not the answer, pain relief is” (she might try teaching that to the “natural birth” zealots among Britain’s midwives).

Ms Flint admitted she had heard these horror stories only “anecdotally”. Anybody with an ear in the real world would surely have known straightaway that such tales are an urban myth. Presumably these girls who smoke to shrink their babies are the same ones who get pregnant from toilet seats and forcefeed their toddlers chips through a teat.

Worse, this story is, literally, a joke. My wife reports that, ever since health warnings about having a fag while having a baby began, pregnant women whom she knows have been joking with each other about taking up smoking to make childbirth less painful. No doubt you have to be there, in full hormonal bloom, to see how funny it is. Call it labour-ward humour.

This is a sign of how far out-of-touch ministers and health experts are with those whom they patronise as “ordinary people”. Behind all their touchy-feely talk of “inclusion”, these social engineers retain a deeply contemptuous view of young working-class women as the fag-end of society.

The chief executive of the National Childbirth Trust responded to Ms Flint’s claim by saying, presumably with a straight face: “We are bringing up our young women very fearful of labour.” Those who retain a sense of humour on this subject can fill in your own punchline.

• ANY DOUBTS that modern celebrity has triumphed over old-fashioned heroism should have been dispelled by the story of Private Johnson Beharry. Last year he became the first living recipient of the Victoria Cross since 1969, for saving the lives of his comrades under fire in Iraq. Now it seems that even this gallant soldier is expected to behave like a fame-seeking reality TV contestant.

  Beharry’s autobiography, Barefoot Soldier, has now been published. That might seem unusual for a 26-year-old who was just made a lance corporal. But much of the content seems familiar from other ghost-written celebrity confessional memoirs — headline-friendly stories about his drunken father, drug-taking, family problems, etc, etc. Predictably his estranged wife has also been in the papers revealing “How VC hero dumped me”.

  Watching Beharry being treated as a celebrity squaddie on BBC Breakfast this week, looking stiff and slightly bewildered in his uniform while the interviewer asked if he would like “to show us your wounds”, I half expected Trinny and Susannah to burst in and give him a stripped-off makeover. Meanwhile the party of Churchill and Thatcher overwhelmingly passes an emergency conference motion, proclaiming a celebrity TV chef to be our “national hero”.

• AS A VETERAN of the Left with long experience of how far the opponents of progress will go, let me warn you that anything that looks embarrassing or wrong in this Notebook has clearly been faked by my enemies, by cutting up and splicing together other people’s columns, probably with the involvement of MI5’s secret scissors. Look closely, and you may even see somebody else’s words between the lines. So I know how Tommy Sheridan feels.

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