Daily Record hack Torcuil Crichton has had another curious memory lapse in the paper today, in a dramatic piece headlined “Labour will axe Atos if we return to power, vows shadow work and pensions minister Liam Byrne”. A Record insider leaked us this redacted image of the original draft version:

Can you supply the missing words?

Alert readers will of course have spotted the big clue – the UK government in 2008 was the Labour one of Gordon Brown. The contract Byrne wants ripped up is the one his own party gave Atos, when Byrne himself was a Cabinet minister.

But it’s not just embarrassingly transparent cynicism that’s on display here. Anyone who’s been following British politics for the last few years will be a little mystified by Byrne’s sudden conversion to a champion of the poor, disabled and vulnerable.

As recently as last month he was attacking the Tories for not cutting benefits enough and promising that Labour would reduce the welfare bill further by increased use of forced-labour “workfare” schemes. In July the LabourList website savaged him for trying to “out-do the Tories on social security cuts”, while the New Statesman highlighted his criticism of the coalition’s benefit cap, bemoaning “Labour’s disastrous new line of attack on the benefit cap: it’s too soft”.

So why the sudden change of heart? Well, it’s not just Byrne. As the UK media splashes Damien McBride’s shocking revelations about life inside the last Labour government all over its pages, the party is fighting to get coverage for a sudden avalanche of pledges gushing out of its conference.

An incoming Labour, we’re told, will raise the minimum wage, embark on a vast programme of housebuilding, end the bedroom tax and more besides, all funded from the pockets of the rich. It sounds exactly like the sort of large-scale socialist programme the party’s been avoiding like the plague since 1997 for fear of scaring off the right-wing swing voters in England it needs to form a government, and exactly the sort of programme it didn’t enact when it WAS in power for 13 years.

But here’s the thing – as we noted last week, the voters of England are getting dramatically MORE right-wing, not less. So who is this leftward lurch meant to win over, who wasn’t going to vote Labour anyway? It’s possible, of course, given Ed Miliband’s promise at the same conference to reduce immigration, that it’s simply an attempt to stem any flow of working-class anti-immigrant votes to UKIP, or to shore up a disillusioned core vote as Labour’s poll lead over the Tories vanishes.

Neither of those, though, seem likely to have anywhere near enough effect to win Labour the 2015 election, especially when weighed against the floating right-wing votes they’ll lose. And our view is that the move represents something very different: Labour is preparing for defeat.

We’ve been pointing out for months, of course, that Labour isn’t going to win in 2015. But it seems to us that the party itself is now accepting that too, and getting its excuses in early. And to our admittedly cynical minds, there’s only one aim behind that which stands up to any logical examination.

If Labour loses in 2015 on a socialist manifesto, it can say to its rank-and-file members and activists “Look, we tried it your way and lost. We HAVE to continue moving to the right, like it or not, because that’s how the British people are now and we don’t want another lost generation like 1979-97”.

Those at the top of the party are still almost all Blair-era New Labourites. The right wing is where they’re comfortable, and where they feel they have the best chance of achieving power and the sort of riches it brings. They believe – not entirely without justification – that in the face of an overwhelmingly right-wing media and the great shift in the demographics of class in the UK over the last 30 years, there’s simply no chance of getting elected on a socialist platform in their lifetimes, and they’d rather be winners with access to all the advantages that office brings. Principles don’t pay the bills.

Labour’s overnight Damascene conversion is hard to rationally explain any other way. We suspect Torcuil Crichton’s self-censorship reflex is going to have to work rather a lot of overtime in the future.