What did it do for Gordon Brown’s ego, to spend a morning with Barack Obama? There’s his guest attracting cheering crowds of tens of thousands in every city, while Gordon must consider it a good day if he completes a speech without making a puddle.

Instead of Obama, Brown’s people should get him to meet people less popular to make him feel better, so his schedule goes: “7.45am – Discussion on EU expansion with Radovan Karadzic; 8.30am – Breakfast meeting on trade regulations with bloke who pretended to disappear in a canoe.”

Maybe it was this thinking that meant he had a weekend conference with the trade unions. They suggested that Brown should promise to amend one or two of the laws that Blair boasted were “the most restrictive union laws in Europe”, but instead they were told they’d get nothing at all, so the unions said that was all right and they’d carry on providing 90 per cent of Labour’s funding. And the whole point of unions is to be smart at bargaining. They must come away from markets, bragging: “We got a brilliant deal on that rug. We paid double the asking price and the man at the stall gets to keep the rug. And he let us off half the price of delivery.”

How does the Government sell this to the unions? Do they say: “We simply can’t go on ignoring you at the old rates. Across the world the cost of ignoring is soaring to record prices and we’ve all seen the reports from South America and India, where some people haven’t been ignored for over a month. So if we are to fulfil our historic role of telling you to piss off you will have to increase your contributions”.

Presumably the great trade union speeches of the future will go: “Brothers and sisters, I can promise you your union is working night and day in an effort to be utterly humiliated and ignored. Just this morning I personally spent two hours ringing a British Telecom call centre, and listened to 11 tracks of Celine Dion and a whole movement of Vivaldi, without once getting through.”

Not just on the laws, but on the growing inequality, the war, the 42 days detention, pensions and everything, this Government has not just ignored the unions but taken delight in doing so because they think it proves they’re not Old Labour. And it’s the unions’ own fault for refusing to modernise. Instead of giving the Labour Party millions and expecting protection for their members they should hand over 50 grand and demand a peerage. Because you can’t keep living in the past.

The Government may argue they can’t appear to agree to the demands of a narrow layer such as the unions. But luckily they do find a way of agreeing to the demands of the much wider group of managing directors of supermarkets, arms companies and newspapers.

For example, Terry Leahy, chairman of Tesco, was invited on to a panel making laws about town planning, and Digby Jones, former head of the CBI, was given a post in the Government. Because company directing is the trade that most needs protecting in uncertain times.

Whole communities of managing directors meet up every evening in gentlemen’s clubs and fret: “If this board of executives was ever shut down, it wouldn’t just be the major shareholders who’d be finished, it would be the whole darn executive community. This area relies on managing directing, there are families I know that have never known anything else going back nine generations. Accepting bonuses is in their blood, it’s the only life they know.”

Obviously the Government couldn’t go on listening to the demands of self-interested cliques such as firefighters and nurses, and instead they’ve taken the trouble to go on holiday with people like Rupert Murdoch, who must tremble with emotion and stutter: “At last I feel someone’s taking notice of little me.”

Yet somehow, no matter how much the unions are battered about by Labour, they keep handing over their money. But the areas where unions have defied the trend and grown has been where they’re seen to be defending the workforce in the traditional fashion. The teachers’ unions recruited members following the recent strike, the journalists’ union has had some success, and the railworkers’ union has doubled its membership in London, as a result of throughly “old-fashioned” methods, including having a union leader, Bob Crow, who’s so traditional he often gets his words magnificently tangled.

During a dispute about tea-breaks he appeared on London regional news to say: “It has got to the point where some of my members are no longer allowed out for a urination.” That’s a proper union leader.