Citizen Miliband
Listen hard and you will hear something emerging from the political undergrowth. It is the sound of a group of politicians trying to roll out a "Big Idea". In the lead is the man dubbed "Brains" (as in the geeky Thunderbirds puppet) by Alastair Campbell when both men worked at Number 10.
Then David Miliband was the prime minister's ideas man - his head of policy. Now he is often tipped to be prime minister though he is still the most junior member of the Cabinet.
The "Big Idea" has a familiar ring (click here to listen to David Miliband on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radio 4's Today programme this morning). It's a slogan you will have heard before. It's "Power to the People". Not a call to revolution but a call to give citizens the power that people now take for granted as consumers. What does that mean?
First - the power to choose whether it's the school our kids go to, the hospital we use or who provides the care we need if we're elderly or disabled.
Second - the power to sack with new powers planned for parents to trigger the removal of school boards or for residents to trigger the termination of contracts to clean the bins.
Third - the power for communities to choose how money is spent. This is what Miliband calls "double devolution" - not just from Whitehall to Town Hall but from Town Hall to communities and citizens. In the summer we'll see the product of many months of labour by Mr Miliband when he produces a review of local government.
Miliband is not alone. He denies being leader of a new "Primrose Hill Set" - named after the smart district of north London where he lives - which brings together New Labour's best and brightest. I note though that those said to be in the club - the new Downing Street Policy Chief, Matthew Taylor and rising ministers Liam Byrne and James Purnell - this week published a pamphlet called, yes, you guessed it, .
And the granddaddy of the PH set, Alan Milburn, writes in the Guardian today of the need to come to terms with the "Me Generation" who want control over their lives.
What's going on here is in part real policy thinking and in part political positioning. Miliband has been working on these ideas since long before David Cameron was elected Tory leader but his arrival has speeded up their promotion. New Labour fears that Cameron - with his talk of social justice and giving power back to communities - is positioning himself so that at the next election he can claim that people have a choice between Big Government and "compassionate Conservatism".
They want instead to present the choice as between "an enabling state" and a Tory government that abandons those in most need.
Let's be honest, this is hardly going to get them talking down the "Dog & Duck". And, yes, we have heard politicians talk this way before. I recall speeches 20 years ago by leading Tories promising to give power to the "Little Platoons" (a phrase first used by Edmund Burke). And, yes, there are reasons to be sceptical of politicians - of both parties - proclaiming that they'll give power away when they appear to want to take more and more. But that doesn't mean this doesn't matter. Many "Big Ideas" disappear without trace. Others, though, end up shaping our lives.
PS: I told you that nothing would happen whilst I was away. Apart from a ban on smoking in all public places; a vote which will have the effect of forcing people to carry ID cards; a huge defeat for Labour in a by-election; the banning of glorification of terror; the birth of a new Cameron and of the "dual Premiership" it was quiet enough and just the right time to abandon Westminster
I'm 
