CLARE SHORT, the Labour Party’s weapon of mass distraction, appears to have disappeared. Inspectors scoured the constituency of Birmingham Ladywood yesterday in search of this loose cannon with devastating explosive potential, but without success.

Ms Short resigned as International Development Secretary over the Iraq war in a cloud of sanctimony, but she has been so completely invisible during this election that there are some who suspect that she may never have existed at all; that she was merely another scare tactic dreamt up by cyncical Labour spin-doctors.

She was not at her campaign office yesterday; at her home in the north of the city, the curtains were drawn, the doorbell unanswered; she was not in the Bullring, nor in the shopping precinct, nor the council estates. A policeman outside the town hall said that he had not seen her for weeks. We trudged the rainy streets of Brum from north to south and hid behind a dustbin outside her office in the hope of snatching a photograph of the once effusive, now elusive Clare. But all in vain. The lady for Ladywood vanishes.

“I saw her,” Alastair Nicholson, a young man handing out religious leaflets in the town centre, said. But then added: “That was two months ago. She was catching a train. And she took a leaflet.”

Ms Short was said to have attended a forum on gay issues this week; on the other hand, this may have been one of several lookalikes she is believed to employ. The Sun newspaper has become so concerned at the disappearance of the once-outspoken MP that it is offering a prize for anyone who spots her on television.

“She’s not here,” a youth in her campaign office said, blushing suspiciously, and moving to stand between this reporter and a large cupboard. Could the former International Development Secretary and conscience of the nation be hiding inside? The youth insisted that she was out campaigning, and very busy; he declined to say where, or when she might be back, or how she might be contacted.

“She does not want to cooperate. She is not doing any press. And she is not giving any interviews during the election. I can assure you she is campaigning, though.”

“Oh good. Where?”

“I don’t know.”

So there we have it: with a nation preparing to go the polls, Ms Short must be the only politician going to extreme lengths to ensure that the wider public does NOT know what she thinks — about anything, but above all about Iraq and the Prime Minister. A woman famous for making waves has gone mill-pond calm; a politician who could not shut up is now eerily quiet.

“Where is Clare Short?” Philippa Stroud, the Tory candidate, said. “What Ladywood needs is an MP who will work to bring about neighbourhood regeneration. Where is she?”

A Tory campiagn worker sounded genuinely baffled by the mystery of the disappearing Short: “We’ve been all over the constituency in the last five weeks, and we haven’t seen her once.”

Ms Short is sitting on a majority of 18,143, and more than half the population is non-white, with Muslim voters strongly in favour of her position on Iraq. So in a sense she can afford to be off the political radar.

She is not, however, the sort to hold her tongue and one can only speculate on the reasons for her vanishing act. Perhaps Gordon Brown, in whose favour she publicly urged Tony Blair to resign, has told her to pipe down in the interests of the new Blair-Brown truce. Or perhaps she has decided to make peace with the Prime Minister in the hope of regaining a Cabinet position.

It would not be the first time that she has changed her mind: some will recall how she stayed on in the Cabinet after the war started, only to resign later, from a moral high ground so elevated that the air was very thin indeed. Or perhaps she was chastened in the furore after her claim that Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, had been bugged, when it was reported that she had been threatened with deselection.

Still, these are strange political times: the Clare Short who once proclaimed that she says what she thinks on principle, now makes a principle of saying nothing at all.

I don’t like it; it’s unnaturally quiet in Birmingham. In the interests of a free and open election, I think we should demand to see inside that cupboard.

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