The Sketch: Be supportive, Mr Thing, or you'll never land a decent punch on him

Iain Thing's initial tactic of invisibility worked so well he's turned it into a strategy. New polls commissioned by The Sketch put his recognition levels in negative numbers. For every 100 voters, 105 don't know who he is or what he is doing. Why is this? He must be tearing his hair out.

What he does he does well. He lays bare the Prime Minister's prevarications; he draws on a wealth of material out there in the public services – poverty, privilege, fraud, death, corruption, malpractice, misfeasance, waste, pride, sloth, wrath, greed and an endemic statistical dishonesty to hide as much of the above as possible. And yet no Fool with a bladder on a stick could do less to damage the reputation of the man responsible.

The Sketch has repeatedly advised Mr Thing to take a more supportive approach to New Labour. And not because it's more constructive, more cross-party, more co-operative. None of that cack. On the contrary. The first rule of politics says: "Friends are more dangerous than enemies." If he wants to hurt him, he has to help him. He has to be seen to help him. He has to embrace him if he wants to squeeze the breath out of him. No one demonstrates this better than Oliver Letwin. He was up again with the Home Secretary yesterday afternoon, this time talking about the intelligence services. Mr Letwin's common-ground approach is lethal. "I'm glad to see the Home Secretary nodding," he said, "I much prefer to agree with him than disagree with him." In a masterly passage, Letwin took up one of the Government's complaints.

It's true, he said, that the Tories sometimes accuse the Home Secretary of taking liberty too lightly while at the same time demanding protection from obnoxious elements in society. These contradictory demands must be irritating, he sympathised. "I think I might feel irritated myself in his position," he said. That was the good stuff and he had lots more of it. How ignorant he was of the true operations of the intelligence services. How he didn't want to know. How he didn't want to be in a position to know. How glad he was he wouldn't have an opportunity to know for the foreseeable future. "I'm a tortured liberal," he confessed, to laughter.

And then, quietly, amid all this collegial amity Letwin laid out the difference between them. He supported extensions of power for agencies whose main job it was to track down the bad guys; but he would always oppose extensions of that power for agencies and departments whose main purpose in life was for something else. The Food Standards Authority, for instance. The Post Office. And all the other governmental bodies who were to be given rights to inspect our phone records and internet habits. "If we could agree on that as a future basis for our discussion most of our disputes would disappear," he said.

Mr Blunkett was rolled. He was up at once describing it as a very fair point. It was important to distinguish between something or other and "new intrusion". They had to try to codify and pull in things. That's what Parliament was for, pulling in things. And from here the Home Secretary blethered so babblingly I'll have to check Hansard before he gets to amend it.

Iain Thing never gets within this sort of grappling distance. And he'll never do any damage until he does.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com