Confident Mahmood may be the true heir to Blair

I loved it, obviously. A Labour cabinet minister telling the sentimental wing of her own party that it had to face up to some tough decisions if it wanted to deliver compassionate, social democratic policies for the people.

- JOHN RENTOUL

For those of us who think that, on balance, Tony Blair was a good prime minister, it was a thrilling moment in the House of Commons: Shabana Mahmood, on top of her brief, swatting aside critics on both sides. But above all, someone who was prepared to tell the naive elements of her own party that she wouldn't take any holier-than-thou pieties from them, that she knows what her Labour values are, and that she is prepared to do whatever it takes to put them into practice.

It was, of course, most enjoyable on Monday to watch her put the sanctimonious Liberal Democrats and Greens in their place - not to mention the SNP and Plaid Cymru. While so many in her party go all soft at the knees at the thought of Ed Davey and Zack Polanski stealing Labour voters, and think that Labour should copy its rivals to the so-called left, Mahmood was having none of it.

When Max Wilkinson of the Lib Dems lectured her about "stoking division by using immoderate language" for claiming that the country is being "torn apart" by immigration, she said: "I wish I had the privilege of walking around this country and not seeing the division that the issue of migration and the asylum system is creating." She then dramatised her own experience of racism by dropping the f-bomb, possibly the first time the word has been used from the despatch box.