How deep the irony that invocation of Aneurin Bevan is all too often little more than a gesture of contentless radicalism, much in the manner of a faded Che Guevara poster ironically adorning the walls of an undergraduate hipster’s bedsit.

To this day, Neil Kinnock’s curious penchant for upholding a one-time militant miners’ strike leader as a primary inspiration, even while actively seeking to weaken Scargill in 1984-85, readily springs to mind.

The tradition continued when Gordon Brown happily provided the foreword for the 60th anniversary reprint of Bevan’s 1952 book In Place of Fear. Given the volume’s overt demands for widespread social ownership, the temptation is to conclude that the arch exponent of PFI could not have read it too attentively beforehand.

The latest Labour figure to pull off this now-overused trick is, of course, Owen Smith. The Pontypridd MP is mounting a leadership challenge to Jeremy Corbyn, and in consequence is these days somewhat keener than hitherto to affect an air of radicalism.

His ritual incantations are strangely toe-curling. Smith has even gone so far as to call Nye ‘my great hero’, while newspaper profiles have spoken of his ‘close identification of himself with Bevan’ as the ‘key to understanding Smith’s thinking’.

Of course, the desire to establish leftist credentials through a surrogate is a time-honoured stratagem for those boasting few of their own, but nevertheless forced by expediency suddenly to conjure some up from somewhere.

The NHS is a good thing? Check. Council housing is a good thing too? Check. He even dropped opposition to nuclear weapons in the end. And South Wales born and bred to boot! Perfect. Colour me beautiful, I’m a Bevanite.

But if avowal of fealty is to mean anything other than a fatuous namecheck, it would actually have to entail something substantial in terms of socialist commitment. And this is where the ploy all breaks down.

Bevan’s entire stated political philosophy was based on the contention that there are three main forces in British society, namely private property, poverty and democracy. And he was not in any doubt as to which he wished to see prevail:

‘The issue therefore in a capitalist democracy resolves itself into this: either poverty will use democracy to win the struggle against property, or property, in fear of poverty, will destroy democracy,’ Bevan famously wrote. ‘The function of parliamentary democracy … is to expose wealth-privilege to the attack of the people. It is a sword pointed at the heart of property-power.’

Hey Compliance Unit, better check this guy’s Twitter timeline, pronto. Were Corbyn or McDonnell to write anything as explicit as that, they would be crucified.

Then, of course, there is the issue of Bevan’s close relations with the Communist Party. A strong advocate of the formation of a popular front, he was briefly expelled from Labour in 1939 for his links with Britain’s premier apologists for Stalinist Russia.

Today’s Labour right has extracted ample mileage by levelling similar charges against key members of Team Corbyn, decades after any of this has ceased to matter in the real world. So don’t expect Smith to emulate his icon on this one, either.

So if Citizen Smith is no Bevanite – and he’s no Owenite either, but that’s another article – what exactly is he? We’ll find out as his platform develops, I guess. Heaven knows, Britain could certainly do with £200bn additional infrastructure investment, and any attempt to bring about better gender balance in British politics will be entirely welcome.

But the offer falls a long way short of Bevan’s bowdlerised Marxism, which boiled down to a call for parliament to salami slice capitalism out of existence. The postwar Labour governments never got anywhere near that, of course. Yet their achievements were real and transformatory, in a sense in which nothing I can imagine Smith putting forward could come anywhere close.

And despite the occasional rhetorical assertions otherwise, it isn’t even fair to call his policies ‘Corbynism with competence’, either. Rest assured, I don’t doubt the competence, just the Corbynism.

Unless and until he can show otherwise, we are being asked to buy into merely the latest iteration of social democratic managerialism, tweaked a few millimetres to the left by a guy who even looks like a bank manager.

However you want to paint the legacy of Aneurin Bevan, it deserves a memorial vastly more glittering than that.