Ed Miliband's speech to the Labour party conference last month famously saw him forget to talk about two of the issues which most concern the voters who will decide his fate next May – immigration and tackling Britain's debts.
Amnesia, however, doesn't explain that the man who may be running the nation's foreign policy in just over six months devoted just seconds of his 65-minute address to matters beyond our island. Nonetheless, one foreign policy issue didn't slip Miliband's mind: Israel. It was also, along with his condemnation of the Iraq War, the only mention of overseas which featured in his first address to the Labour party as its leader in 2010.
This is no coincidence. For, while Labour prides itself on its internationalist tradition, under his leadership, foreign policy has become a matter of electoral calculation. Miliband has bet the house on the so-called "35 per cent strategy" - that winning the support of left-leaning voters who defected to the Liberal Democrats over Iraq in 2005, but who recoiled from Nick Clegg after he formed the coalition, will see him into Downing Street. And, sadly, for too many of these voters it is Iraq and Israel which fires their burning sense of moral outrage.
It is these electoral calculations which explain why Labour this week opted to whip its MPs to vote for a motion to unilaterally recognise Palestinian statehood sponsored by Grahame Morris, Richard Burden, and Jeremy Corbyn.
It was Morris, of course, who last month compared the IDF to ISIS when parliament debated the conflict in Gaza and Islamic State's murderous rampage through Iraq and Syria. A couple of days later, alongside Burden and Corbyn, he was also happy to share a platform at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally with the Liberal Democrat MP David Ward who had Tweeted in July: "The big question is - if I lived in Gaza would I fire a rocket? - probably yes."
The vote on Palestine was whipped up by extremists
On this issue, Miliband and his shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, are now involved in a dangerous flirtation with Labour's radical fringe, one which has provoked serious concerns in the shadow cabinet. But the appeals of frontbenchers to support Ian Austin and Louise Ellman's amendment, that recognition of Palestine should come "only on the conclusion of successful peace negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority", or to allow a free vote, were ignored by both men. Insiders describe it as "gesture politics". They despair that the carefully balanced position Labour has maintained for years has been carelessly jettisoned. That neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown would ever have aligned their party publicly on Middle Eastern issues with the likes of Morris, Corbyn and Burden hardly needs saying. But Miliband has long dreamt of assembling a coalition that would allow him to throw off what those around him regard as the New Labour straitjacket. He and Alexander will continue to claim Labour's position on recognising Palestinian statehood - that it should not be unilateral but result from a negotiated two-state solution - remains unchanged.
But that is not the motion they opted to whip their parliamentary party to support. An opposition may be able to engage in such sleights of hand, governments rarely can. What will it mean if Miliband wins next May? That Britain will probably follow the Swedes into an early, tokenistic recognition of Palestine. And then into irrelevance in the region: its leverage sapped by a gesture of futile naivety.