WHO is taken in by Tony Blair's pious gesture of refusing the 26 per cent pay rise that greedy MPs awarded themselves last week and accepting only the three per cent increase that he called for them to vote for instead?

If he hopes to make out that, under his leadership, Labour is the party of moral and fiscal rectitude, he is wasting his time.

How can it be when, at the vote in the Commons, only three of the 21 members of the Shadow Cabinet followed his example?

(And, after this, please, will Home Secretary-in-waiting, Blackburn's MP Jack Straw, expectant of £103,000 a year as a minister proper, now spare us the familiar words of outrage each time some Fat Cat public utility boss sticks his snout in the pay trough).

But even if Mr Blair could somehow manage to draw attention away from such hypocrisy among the bulk of the Shadow Cabinet, he surely cannot cover up the cant of the parliamentary party generally.

If you want a measure of on which side of the House the bulk of self-interest lies, you only have to compare the number of Labour and Tory MPs who voted against this thumping and insulting inflation-busting increase that is costing taxpayers £24million a year.

Just 34 Labour MPs did so whereas three times as many Tories resisted the urge to grab. New Labour? Old-fashioned avarice, more like.

It is astounding that with such a huge bunch of inflation busters sitting both alongside and behind him on the benches at Westminster tokenist Tony can have been rash enough in his recent mini-manifesto to make tight control of inflation one of Labour's key pledges.

But, of course, as with education, it seems that certain politicians consider that their stated policies apply to us, not them. I wonder whether it was the thought of their children's opted-out schools going independent and charging fees that prompted one or two Labour MPs who joined the greedy grabbers of all parties last week to vote the way they did.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.