It’s a trait that is symptomatic of so much that’s wrong with New Labour. Time and again they kid themselves that they are doing something because they think it’s good enough to appear to have done it.

Take the dreadful case of Baby P, the 17-month-old child tortured and killed, allegedly by his own mother and her boyfriend in London’s Haringey.

At Prime Minister’s Questions last week David Cameron’s genuine passion and anger over this case stood in stark contrast to Brown’s procedural stuttering, bumbling and mumbling and some unforgivable heckling from the Labour benches.

I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t want to see justice done in this case. The head of Haringey children’s services and her cohorts must be brought to book but ultra-PC Haringey is Labour-led so that wouldn’t do at all, would it?

Having asked whether the House thought it reasonable that the head of Haringey should be allowed to conduct her own inquiry, Mr Cameron was met, inexplicably, by cries of “Shame!” from Labour. That was the final straw for the leader of the Opposition.

“I’ll tell you what’s shameful,” said Mr Cameron, “trying to shout down someone who’s asking reasonable questions about something that has gone wrong. It’s about a boyfriend who couldn’t read but could beat a child and it’s about a social services department that gets £100million a year and can’t look after children.”

And Gordon Brown’s cold and craven response? He accused Mr Cameron of “making a party political issue of this issue”. Oh dear, oh dear.

The reaction of New Labour to the whole Baby P affair is as routine as it is depressing: they will make sure it doesn’t happen again.

But we know they won’t. They’ll just appear to be trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And another child will die.

But the Baby P case wasn’t the sole example this week of Labour trying to kid themselves.

We also had the extraordinary story of head teacher Caroline Haynes, pictured, and her zero tolerance approach to discipline at her school in Essex.

She has been excluding an average of two or more pupils every day for bad behaviour; a total of 478 suspensions. The usual figure for a typical secondary school is 116.

As a result, the exam pass rate at the school has rocketed. The rate of pupils achieving grades of A* to C at GCSE has soared from 48 per cent to 74 per cent since she began her crackdown.

So what was the reaction of Balls’s Department For Children, Schools and Families to Ms Haynes’s remarkable success? “Head teachers have our full support to permanently exclude pupils where their behaviour warrants it and we trust their judgment to decide what sanctions will work best.”

Er, no they haven’t, Mr Balls, and no you don’t. In fact, Ms Haynes is flying directly in the face of your own Government guidelines.

Have you somehow forgotten that you have been encouraging schools to reduce exclusions because it reflects better in their Ofsted rating? (A recipe for unrest and indiscipline in our schools if ever one was concocted.)

Or are you, like the rest of New Labour and your glorious leader, simply deluding yourself?