LABOUR RARELY forgives a leader for being effective. As Neil Kinnock remarked this week of his party’s post-election ructions: “They were much nicer to me when I lost than they have been to Tony when he won.”

Among those critics, none has been more rancorously unreflective than Frank Dobson, the former Health Secretary. Castigating the Prime Minister as an “enormous liability”, he went on television on Sunday to talk down Labour’s prospects in London’s municipal elections next year should Blair still be party leader.

Dobson speaks with authority: he is the single biggest net vote-loser Labour has fielded in the capital in recent years. Only three years after Labour’s 1997 landslide, he barely managed third place in the election for Mayor of London. His Holborn & St Pancras constituency recorded swings to the Liberal Democrats of 8 per cent and 11 per cent in the past two general elections.

Dobson once volunteered that he tended not to bother writing to his constituents, on the ground that they formed a largely transient population. In my experience, at least, of being a Dobson constituent this was not affable whimsy but literal truth. I wrote to Dobson a dozen times over 18 months with the same question without receiving an answer. Eventually his constituency office phoned to say Frank was irritated with my volume of letters (as was I).

A reply eventually followed, in which Frank said he would be taking no action in the case I had raised. Taking no action is something he does well.

As a minister, Dobson allowed medical priorities to be distorted by an emphasis on measurable targets (particularly on waiting lists) rather than on treating clinically more urgent cases. He has since campaigned obdurately against the Government’s “elitism” in health and education, in defiance of the facts. Allowing universities to charge top-up fees is highly progressive: better-off students lose fee subsidies while poor students receive grants.

Dobson has managed to turn his once impregnable Labour seat into a marginal. To the extent that Labour heeds his views on the party’s future, he will do the same to other nominally safe seats. At least if he chooses an overdue retirement at the next election, he will bequeath his successor an easy act to follow.