I confess: I do it, too. Like most Western women, I do it regularly, and it is a guilty pleasure every time. It is hard to listen to one's conscience when one is faced with so much incredible temptation. I am talking, of course, about cheap trendy fashion. I'll visit a Zara — or H&M, or, now that I am in the United Kingdom for the summer, the amazing Primark — and snap up items that are "cute," effectively disposable, and so shockingly inexpensive that one does a double take.

The Miliband brothers are many things: confident, articulate, canny political operators, two men in their prime who are hungry for power and have brains the size of small moons. Even their detractors admit they are a formidable force on the Labour scene, with one or other of them most likely to be crowned party leader in a few months' time.