GORDON BROWN appears to believe that all families are hard-working. He can no longer say “family” without first adding the words “hard-working”.

He is mistaken. I know this from personal experience. I am quite lazy.

Only when a Cabinet minister says something utterly stupid can I be bothered to get in front of the computer and do some writing. My wife is worse. She does nothing but lunch with friends and tend to our 2-year-old daughter when the latter is not asleep or at pre-school. And the child herself is indolence on little legs; she has made not the least contribution to the gross domestic product. The Whytes are, at best, a soft-working family.

Mr Brown must know about us — not the idle Whytes in particular but slack families generally. He must know that many or even most families are not really hard-working. So why does he say they are?

To see why, consider another of Mr Brown’s favoured falsehoods. In his speech to the Labour Party spring conference, he declared that “every child is precious, every child unique, every child very special, every child counts”.

There were about a thousand children at my school and I doubt that even a hundred were special or precious. And, if I have properly understood the meaning of unique, it is impossible for every child to be unique.

All my classmates could count — that much I’ll concede — but standards were higher back then.

Mr Brown cannot really believe that every child is special, any more than he believes that all families are hard-working. But it is useful to say such things because it obviates the need for any proper defence of his redistributive policies. Why is it a good idea to direct more government spending at poor families with children? Quite simply because these children are precious. There is no need to consider the incentive effects of means-tested benefits, the impact of shifting money from one part of the economy to another, or any such policy wonkery. Who will deny special children what they deserve? And who will deny that every child is special?

I do, of course, but then I am not a politician. Michael Howard cannot afford to take my stand against the mediocre little scroungers. Nor can he point out that many families are not really hard-working. Once Mr Brown has offered the virtuous their reward, Mr Howard cannot insult them and take it away.

And then it is a race for the high ground of targeted caring. Mr Howard matches Mr Brown on hard-working families but trumps him on pensioners, who “make a huge contribution to our society”. In fact, of course, many pensioners contribute next to nothing. But that is irrelevant. In the politics of pandering, everyone must be flattered.

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