Will they dance around it every solstice?

HASTINGS – lucky Hastings – was the venue chosen for Ed Miliband’s descent into lunacy. Or was it satirical brilliance? His latest move was so peculiar, so off the graph in self-parody, doubt nibbles me like minnows a bather’s feet.

Mr Miliband unveiled a vast slab of stone. Some modern Michelangelo had been employed to carve six Labour ‘pledges’ (more accurately slogans) on this Milibandian menhir.

It would be placed in the Downing Street garden, we were told, so that Prime Minister Miliband would be able, when resting his pen while signing revolutionary decrees, to gaze out of his study window and see the Great Stone glowering at him. It would remind him – in the course of his mission to transform Britain! – that Labour’s manifesto ideas had been ‘cast in stone’.

When Moses tottered down from the upper slopes of Mount Sinai it was at least a sunny day (so my childhood Bible’s illustration always suggested). Mr Miliband, on whom the sun does not always shine, had to make do with a squelchy morning in a car park in coastal East Sussex.

Ye Great Stone had been hoisted into temporary place via ropes and scaffolding. Labour spin doctors did not want it toppling and squashing the visionary who had commissioned it, after all.

THE Hastings and Rye constituency i s an interesting one. In 2010 it dumped Labour after 18 years of pretty humdrum Labour r epresentation and narrowly voted for a Tory, Amber Rudd. She’ s magnifi ce n t , Amber, pure flesh and blood – unlike that idiotic stone which towered above Mr Miliband yesterday morning.

It was hard to know which was more irritating, the official Labour typeface in which the ‘pledges’ had been reproduced, or the strangely juvenile signature of Mr Miliband which appeared underneath.

If Labour goes into government with the SNP, will Nicola Sturgeon’s signature have to be added? Will they have to scratch out some of the pledges and add different ones to accommodate the Nats’ wishes?

We cannot say that a large crowd had gathered f or the important event.

The gathering was limited to a handful of Labour activists, some of them holding soggy ‘Labour 2015’ flags. They looked up at the stone their Prophet had just unveiled and they looked, well, a bit puzzled. A boy of about 12 stood near Mr Miliband. The expression on his face appeared so say ‘er, what do we do now?’

‘We will restore faith in politics!’ cried Mr Miliband, by way of filling that awkward moment of uncertainty. Ye Great Stone would allow voters to ‘remind us of these pledges, insist on these pledges’, he continued. Cambodia has Angkor Wat. Easter Island has its statues (who, now you mention it, do look a bit like honky-hootered Ed). Now the Downing Street garden would have this Mili-stone, this lump of mad masonry. Plonk.

The plan is said to be still not entirely certain – now there’s a surprise – but it will presumably go in one of those flower beds near t he back gate where Samantha Cameron plants her aromatherapy herbs and where Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah used to grow vegetables.

Will full-breasted Harmanite maidens and fluting-voiced New Labour press officers dance round this stone every summer solstice? Or will it one day be found covered in lichen in some back garden in Doncaster, near rusting prams, discarded lavatory bowls and boxes of never-distributed leaflets entitled ‘The Miliband Ascendancy’?

BACK on Planet Earth, if we can call i t that, BBC1’s Marr programme was broadcast for its final episode before polling day. Nick Clegg did a turn, as did Nigel Farage and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. No Conservative was accommodated.

We learned little save that Miss Cooper has become amazingly deep-voiced. Has she taken up cigarillos? Shades of Lee Marvin’s basso profundo when he sang I Was Born Under A Wanderin’ Star. Perhaps she worked herself hoarse trying to persuade Mr Miliband that his stone was the silliest gimmick since the Austin Allegro’s square steering wheel.