Some people may remember the 1970s, when trade unionists “left the dead unburied”. Newspapers such as The Sun screamed about this outrage on almost every page, until you expected the weather report to say: “Today should be moderately windy, which will at least help to blow away the smell of the unburied dead.” Or for the horoscope to say: “Capricorn - Today is not a good day to die as some Sagittarian bastard from the TGWU will leave you unburied.” Or for a crossword clue to be: “Coming together to leave the dead unburied perhaps (5).”

Some people must have thought this was how unions worked, that they piled rotting stiffs on to the back of a truck, drove round to the manager’s house and said: “Give us a rise or we’ll dump these in your kitchen.” And that they had names like the National Union of Corpse Leavers and Allied Ignorers of Deadness.

At the heart of these allegations was the charge that unions were undemocratic. They bullied ordinary folk into voting for militants and for strikes. So if the unions ever show such contempt for democracy again, we can be sure the same diligent newspapers would be eager to expose them. So here’s a thing. Eighteen months ago the civil servants’ union, the PCS, held an election for General Secretary. The outgoing leader Barry Reamsbottom, who calls himself a Blairite, failed to win enough nominations from union branches to get into the final ballot, which was won by a left-winger Mark Serwotka, who was due to take over next week. But last Thursday Barry Reamsbottom announced he wasn’t going. Just like that - not even “tell you what, best of three”. He’d decided, he said, that the election didn’t count.

Yet this was reported in The Sun as a noble victory against the left who had “seized control” of the union. Oh those sinister lefties and their Machiavellian methods of seizing control. They sneakily stand for election, then get someone to operate a system known as “counting the votes”. Then they hope they’ve got what’s known as “more than the others”, at which point they declare themselves the so-called “winner”. The Sun also reported that when Mr Reamsbottom made his announcement, “Marxists threw themselves on the table”. Because that’s what Marxists do. As part of their plot for world domination, at critical points in history they launch themselves at furniture. Because in The Communist Manifesto Marx wrote: “To eliminate the bourgeois mode of production it is essential for the proletariat to chuck themselves on desks.”

Tony Blair was reported to have been “delighted” at Mr Reamsbottom’s decision, so someone ought to relay this to John Major, who could announce he’s coming back as Prime Minister to stop Blair seizing control of the country, as the last two elections are null and void.

There were other peculiarities about this event. The union’s computer system crashed for 36 hours, suddenly coming back on the moment that Mr Reamsbottom made his announcement. At this point you have to wonder whether Henry Kissinger was involved. With that and all the stuff about “saving the union from left-wing control”, it wouldn’t be that surprising if CIA documents were discovered, insisting the action was a necessity because if the PCS went red, next would be the MSF, followed by the NUT, Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia.

Part of Barry Reamsbottom’s defence is that when he agreed to hold the election he was “under duress”. If only New Labour supporters had thought of this sort of thing before. When Ken Livingstone became mayor of London they could have said “it doesn’t count because when we agreed to have the election some of us had dodgy tummies”. Or maybe he means hired goons came round his house in the middle of the night and warned him he’d better hold an election, otherwise he might find Marxists throwing themselves all over his table.

It’s not just the left that’s cross about this. A candidate for the Blairite section of the union wrote an impressively honest letter to this paper yesterday in outrage, referring to Mr Reamsbottom and his “megalomanical cronies”.

Or perhaps Mr Reamsbottom is just like any other person fearing retirement who wants to keep himself active. If he fails to get away with this he might walk into other institutions and announce he’s taking them over as well; the Women’s Institute maybe, or the British Table Tennis Association, in order to stop the forehand smash faction seizing control.

Imagine the furore if a left-winger behaved in this way. They’d be all over the papers as Napoleon, Stalin and Stephen Byers rolled into one. A squad of bouncers would arrive at the union office and say “I don’t think so sonny” and that would be the end of it. But there’s a theory that Labour has only become electable by changing to New Labour, so if a Blairite loses an election to a non-Blairite it must be reality that’s wrong and needs correcting.