Dave has some special new Labour friends

Anne McElvoy spots a new political type: the ‘Labrators’ who have more in common with Cameron than Brown, and may co-operate with a Tory government

The Labrators are coming: cross-bred symbols of shifting political times. Labour by background and allegiance, they empathise with many of the New Conservatives’ aims and obsessions. As for the political divide, they don’t so much straddle it, as just ignore it.

The only question is how far they’ll go, now that the party that dominated the landscape is a shrunken spectre of its former self. ‘The thing to watch,’ says one of the resigners from Cabinet last week, ‘is who will get involved with Project Cameron and who won’t cross that line.’

Commons floor-crossers have always been with us, treated with some distrust by both their parental and adoptive parties. But as the boundaries between the main parties’ ideologies narrow, fear of contamination by collusion is far less oppressive than it was.

Matthew Taylor, Tony Blair’s former policy chief who now runs the Royal Society of Arts, is a leading Labrator. ‘Speaking as a private individual, I support my party, like I support my football team,’ he says. ‘But I also care about good government. If you kind of know your party is going to lose, and someone else asks you to contribute ideas, I can’t see why not.’ These days, there are a lot more Labrators than Torylabs around, although there was a glut of the latter when Blair was at his height. Shades of that linger in the shadow schools secretary Michael Gove and Cameron’s senior strategist Steve Hilton, who are far more gushing about the Blair than many in his own ranks.