Martin Bright

The last time I was invited to Alan Duncan's office in the House of Commons I took a film camera with me. I didn't hide it and took a film crew along with me. Duncan was charming, if a little cheesy, and talked eloquently about why Ken Livingstone's oil deal with Hugo Chavez was bad news for London and Venezuela. But during the interview there was something that gave me a glimpse into Alan Duncan's soul. Not an off-the-cuff comment about MPs having to live on rations. But a framed photograph proudly displayed on a bookshelf. It was a screenshot from Prime Minister's questions of Alan Duncan alongside George Osborne and they were -- there is no other word for it -- braying. It was posh Tories in their full pomp and it sent a shiver up the spine.

As readers of a right-wing magazine there is no reason you will have heard of the following individuals, but as this is supposed to be coming to you from enemy territory, listen and learn. Luke Akehurst (activist, councillor, Labour parliamentary candidate in 2001 and 2005) has always been a passionate advocate of the centrist New Labour orthodoxy. Funny thing to get passionate about, you might think. But Luke's Blog has been essential reading for those fascinated by the minutiae of Labour politics for some time.

Some will see it as final proof that I have made the journey from left to right, but I have to say I don't see it that way. In tomorrow's Telegraph I have written a column calling for the revival of the Thatcher-era Enterprise Allowance Scheme. This initiative gave a £40 per week payment to people who wanted to get off the dole and set themselves up in business. Alumni include Alan McGee, who set up Creation Records on the EAS, Julian Dunkerton of the Superdry fashion label and visual artists Jane and Louise Wilson. New Deal of the Mind was commissioned by the Arts Council to examine the government's response to the recesssion.

The moral of the story is: don't mess with the British state. I woke up this morning to a message from my old Observer colleague Antony Barnett, who now works for Channel 4's Dispatches, urging me to look at page 31 of the Daily Mail. There in all her glory was a transvestite called Delores Kane, who bore a distinct resemblance to the former MI5 officer David Shayler. It's not so long ago that David announced he was the messiah and now he has decided Jesus was a transvestite and that he, Shayler, must take the form of Delores. I was one of many journalists who worked with David when he left the Security Service in the late 1990s. I first met him when he was living in exile in France and we worked on several stroies together.

Last night's edition of BBC2's The Conspiracy Files was a fine piece of television. It examined the conspiracy theories surrounding the bombings of July 7 2005 and if you haven't seen it, watch it again right now. At first I thought it was going to be another piece of gratuitous "what if?" television. But it was so much better than that. By taking the conspiracy theories surrounding the atrocities at face value, the programme makers gave the loons enough rope with which to hang themeslves. The theory that Israelis were somehow warned of the attacks in advance was forensically dismantled and the idea that the bombs were planted under the carriages of the trains shown to be nonsens.

The best New Labour policies have always been designed for sale to liberals and reactionaries at the same time. When I was on The Observer I always made a point of asking for the Mail on Sunday half of the story whenever I was pitched a Sunday trail for a policy launch during the week ahead. Of course this briefing of journalists in advance of a government launch will no longer happen in the new era of parliamentary propriety (until the next time). But its worth applying this to the latest Gordon Brown policy document: Building Britain's Future. Some of this policy fits the model perfectly.

This may seem a peculiar thing to say after weeks of anger from the public and self-laceration among MPs, but I'm not talking about the fall-out from the expenses scandal. I was in Westminster for the first time in ages the other day to attend a meeting about Bangladesh in the Lords. I can't remember the number of the committee room now and I could certainly never locate it again. The Commons (or was it Lords?) staff were very helpful in helping me find it, although stricltly speaking they allowed me down a stretch of corrridor and down a staircase that was out-of-bounds. At the end of it I felt like a little boy on my first day at school. This sort of thing often happens to me when I venture into parliament.

Kitty Ussher's article in today's Evening Standard made me think again about the consequences of the MPs' expenses scandal. Kitty will be leaving us at the next election because she wants to put her family first (a reworking of the old "more time with my family" formula). Her question is a fair one: "Am I alone in wanting to see my young family in that crucial gap between school ending and lights out?" It is right that she resigned as a minister, but I do wonder about the scale of this shock to parliament. The combination of almost certain electoral oblivion and expenses revelations means that we will lose two generations of parliamentary talent on the Labour side. On the Conservative side there will also be some serious losses, of whom Paul Goodman is the most obvious example.