For a few seconds, he held it, again distastefully, between two fingers, and then he draped it over the back of his chair, where it began to drip, with the smell of wet cloth.
He and Labour have accumulated too many mistakes and behaved too distastefully, some think, like John Major's cabinet in the mid-1990s (though it was the personality of Sir John's complacent party rather than his own that was the main problem then).