Labour has run into a little local difficulty with its Mansion Tax proposal. Perhaps the biggest problem is that, although the proposal is very popular amongst the general public, many of the people affected by it have easy access to the media – notably journalists themselves, so-called ‘celebrities’, and other powerful people. There are also large clusters of them in some inner London marginal Labour seats. So they can raise a stink in a few hours while it took months of extremely hard slog by a lot of people to get some coverage for the abomination known as the bedroom tax, which hit much poorer people much harder.

The latest ‘celebrity’ to get acres of coverage was the unutterably unfunny Griff Rhys Jones, who said he would leave the country if it is introduced. ‘Goodbye’ was the common Twitter response. This man made much of his money from the BBC…