Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown have peddled some pretty good bilge in their time, but I don't think I have ever seen anything so bare-faced and intellectually putrid as their attempt to blame the Tories for the sorry state of the pound.

In a few weeks, we are all off skiing. I am much looking forward to it. Or at least I was, until I realised that we are going to France, where they use the euro - and in all the history of the single European currency, the pound has never, ever been so puny as a purchaser of euro-denominated assets. If I buy a lunchtime tartiflette to be shared between my four famished children, I can now expect to pay 25 per cent more than last year. And if I try to drown my sorrows with a vin chaud, I will have to cope not only with the outrageous Alpine mark-up, but with the plummeting of our currency. I will be forced to sip that drink miserably, nursing it in a corner, while all around me hearty red-faced skiers from euroland will be singing shanties and calling for more, slapping their relatively un-devalued banknotes on the counter.

If that isn't the definition of national humiliation, I don't know what is; and what has intensified my rage is the Government's unbelievable suggestion that any further fall would have something to do with George Osborne and his decision to point out what is happening. Ooh, say the Labour MPs, he's being disloyal! He's broken the "convention", they hiss. The shadow chancellor has been "unpatriotic", say the henchpersons of Gordon Brown - and how?