Tim Blair, the new Opinion Editor at the Daily Tele, has built a career out of knowing who his enemies are, and ridiculing them accordingly.

The Greens, the Left, the Latte Left, etc are all central casting villains for Blair — in fact his list of baddies is so set in stone he sometimes gets confused when rounding them up for a ritual skewering.

Which rabid-Lefty do you imagine penned this quote featured by Blair in the Tele’s (ironic) list of Best Quotes of the Year?

Once we were larrikins with a taste of defiance; now we are lapdogs with a thirst for conformity.

Blair pins it on Greens leader Bob Brown. But as an observant Greens operative this morning pointed out, the quote actually belongs to Richard Neville, writing in The Age. (Brown isn’t that much of a stylist.)

We rang Blair this morning to point the out error and he was deliciously contrite. “I’ve made a mistake. I’ll put up a correction,” he said.

Glad to hear it, Tim. How about a few lines for your chief-of-staff too? Something along the lines of “I must not confuse my ageing hippies with my ageing tree huggers…” should do the trick nicely. One hundred times.