Lord Mandelson’s new found willingness to support the “British” car manufacturers is touching. When he tried to get an £80,000 Italian Maserati mid-life-crisis car as his official car out of the EU budget he was less supportive. He was in fact angry that penny-pinching bureaucrats blocked his turbo-tax-powered transport.

It would be a little more credible if the Labour Party last year had listened to the industry when they, in the name of Green taxes, whacked hundreds of pounds extra in tax on all those models that have stayed in the showrooms since. Forgetting that jobs depended on those cars being bought. It is an entirely foreseeable consequence of jacking up taxes that demand has been suppressed over and above the credit crunch problems…