I can’t quite decide which is the more bizarre concept; that of taking seriously the suggestion that Hazel Blears might be a contender for the deputy leadership of the party or Luke Akehurst’s list of the ‘qualities’ he thinks she’d bring to the role, which looks rather more like a solid basis for an indictment than anything else.

In Akehurst’s estimation. Blears in both ‘close to Blair’ and ‘authentically Labour’, which would make her the only candidate to run on an oxymoron.

She’s also, apparently, ‘proved’ that she can connect with our core vote in her own Salford constitutency, that proof being a derisory 42% turnout at the last general election (down from 56.3% in 1997), swings of 4.9% and 6.9% from Labour to the Lib Dems in the last two general elections and a total number of votes at the last election (13,007) some 4,000 less than her majority in 1997 (17,069).

What the hell kind of campaign have they been running up in Salford at the last two elections? “Vote Blears – she’s a bit less crap than the rest’?

She’s also, according to Akehurst, a woman – not sure that the jury’s not still out on that one – and would ‘help us win back women voters’, which always struck me as a desperately patronising line of argument – yes, its alright dear, we’ve got you a woman to vote for so you don’t have to worry about trying to understand any of that complicated political stuff.

She’s (allegedly) an ‘effective campaigner’ – quite where this is happening is a bit of mystery as it certainly isn’t reflected in the turnout and results from her own constituency, which she appears to have inherited in 1997 by the time-honoured expedient of the previous incumbent having been bunged a peerage.

Next, according to Akehurst, she’s from the North West, which is full of the key marginals we need to keep Blears well away from, errr… win – and the North-West hasn’t supplied a Labour Leader or Deputy since Harold Wilson (a Yorkshireman). Perhaps we should follow this line of argument a bit further and put the deputy leadership on a regional rotation, a bit like the World Cup.

She’s also, in Akehurst’s view, particularly strong on the crime & ASB agenda (i.e. criminally insane and deserving of an ASBO).

Pretty much the only statement of Akehurst’s I find myself agreeing with is the observation that Blears is ‘ginger and not very tall’, afflictions for which I believe the ancient Romans had a more than adequate remedy, even if it does tend to get a bit nippy at night, even on an Italian hillside.

Blears may well be a very warm, personable and endearing human being when well away from the public gaze, but put her into the limelight and she gives all the appearance of being congenitally incapable of answering even a simple question, such as ‘would you like a cup of tea?’ with first obtaining a policy briefing from Downing Street and then equivocating on an answer for at least three hours. Prevarication, for Blears, is less a skill and more a way of life.

Factor in her rictus grin and habit of wobbling around in chair like a meerkat doing an impersonation of Stevie Wonder and I put it to you that the very last thing we need as deputy leader of the Labour Party is a demented ginger Weeble who speaks only pure weasel in public, least of all one who’s chief ‘blogging’ supporter looks like the failed outcome of a cloning experiment that involved the DNA of Chris Evans and Joe 90.

And there I rest the case for the prosecution.