I THINK the Jesuits used to call it mental reservation. The rest of us know it as crossing your fingers. It has other good names too. Casuistry. Sophistry. Pettifogging. Being too clever by half.

There can’t be terribly many aspiring Labour politicians who entered politics imagining they’d spend their first few weeks on the job voting to reduce the incomes of millions of British pensioners and pretending – as much to themselves as anyone else – that they must be doing the right thing.

But here they are, and this week, this new-minted generation of Labour ­politicians – many of them now from Scotland – marched through the division lobbies and took to the airwaves to do ­precisely that.

The fact this is one of the first significant public acts of the Starmer government is ­political madness, and it is being handled in the characteristically clunky way we ought to have come to expect from a government dominated by the Labour right, who told everyone they intended to visit misery on the country, and now seems surprised that a decent chunk of the electorate seems to have assumed they were joking or lying.

The kompromat dug up from all the senior Labour figures when in opposition hasn’t helped.

In August 2022, Rachel Reeves told her social media world she would “never forget a woman in Leeds West I spoke to, who had purple fingers because her pension wasn’t enough to pay for the heating. We must act now.”

I somehow doubt the Chancellor’s ­initiative is the kind of action this ­frostbitten granny had in mind for a ­balmier future.

'Tough decision'

Labour’s justification for prioritising these cuts continues to evolve – from ­stripping pensions of their gas money to avoid a Liz Truss-style market event – to presenting the guillotining of this ­universal benefit as a kind of political ­virility test for the party leadership. This, we’re told, is a “tough decision to improve living........

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