Thatcherite David "Two Brains" Willetts who describes him as "many Conservatives' favourite Labour politician."
Three weeks after the May 1 election, the extreme right wing Social Market Foundation published a pamphlet Beyond the Welfare State, which calls for the dismantling of the welfare state and the introduction of fee paying into education and health care - a pamphlet carrying acknowledgements to Field and fellow Blairite Baroness Hollis.
We are told that both of them -as well as Peter Lilley - read the dratt and made comments. Its author praises Field as a man who "discusses the effects of our social security system on character more deeply than any other British politician - except Peter Lilley".
Tory "reforms"
Field has eagerly repaid each compliment, offering fulsome praise of Thatcher, support to the Tory market-style "reforms" of the NHS, encouragement to the Tory sell-off of council housing, and enthusiastic backing to privatisation as the road to what he sees as a "people's capitalism".
Blair announced that Field's •qualification for government office was that he is "capable of Frank Field's book How to Pay for the Future: Building a Stakeholder's Welfare draws heavily on the model of the Chilean economy. The architect of Chile's pension reforms, Dr José Pinera, is one of his heroes.
But what really happened in Chile?
The reforms were introduced in 1981, after the Chilean trade union and labour movement and all political opposition had been ruthlessly crushed by General Pinochet's military dictatorship.
Pinochet's troops seized power in September 1973, determined from the outset to implement the most ruthless and comprehensive experiment in monetarist policy.
To clear the path for this the constitution was suspended, congress was dissolved and the electoral register destroyed. All political and trade union organisations were declared illegal, political activity was banned, civil liberties suspended; imposed.
Hundreds of thousands of people who were suspected of membership of left wing political organisations or linked with the previous regime were killed, imprisoned, tortured or driven into exile.
At least 30,000 were killed in the first four years, with another 2,500 "disappeared", and tens of thousands passing through prisons and concentration camps.
The architects of the economic policies ushered in, on the bones of a devastated workers' movement were dubbed the "Chicago boys" after the Chicago school of monetarist economics headed by Milton Friedman, who visited Chile in 1975 to give personal supervision and support to the "shock treatment" being meted out.
Until mid 1982 when the economy plunged into chaos and recession, the Chicago boys had Pinochet's complete support, and he boasted in 198l that "In this country not a leaf moves unless! move it."
The Chicago boys worked ruthlessly to a rigid ideology: the free market was to be the means through which all relations had to be mediated: Chile had to be forced into the world market, regardless of the cost in jobs and living standards. The currency had to be stabilised, and the public sector deficit slashed.
Privatisation was at the centre of the agenda from the outset. At the time of the coup there were 464 firms under state control: by June 1980 all but a few had been sold off at bargain basement prices. Unemployment doubled in a year.
Public welfare was virtually wiped out. School spending was slashed by 44% in five years, and propio charges were introduced for primary and secondary school education, with the result that 30% of young Chileans were receiving no education at all in 1978. Higher education, too, was devastated, and the expected growth of private universities never materialised.
Those who benefited were of course the super-rich. By 198l even the US Embassy in Santiago reported that Chile's private sector was "an oligopolistic market dominated by six major conglomerates", two of which controlled over 50% of the country's private capital.
This was the Chile in which Frank Field's hero, a chosen Chicago boy protégé of Pinochet, introduced his pension reforms. Individual workers were left to contribute themselves to a private scheme, replacing the old system in which the state and the employers had contributed. Workers were offered the right to switch their accumulated savings in the old state scheme into a private alternative.
Eight years later, inequality was mas facıl invadir el question, it's easier to invade your own country than a neighbour's" greater than ever in Chile. 44% of the population was livirg in poverty.
By 1991 a United Nations review found that only 52% of the Chilean workforce were paying in to Pinera's scheme. Many of these would end up with "acquired benefits less than the guarnateed minimum". But the private pension schemes were coining in profits and levying extensive fees and commission.
Among the heaviest losers had been workers forced into casual and part-time employment and the self-employed.
Predictably, a pensions policy born out of monetarist dogma and imposed by a ruthless dictatorship has served further to exploit and impoverish those on the lowest wages, and to deepen social inequality.
The question is why a Labour politician should look with such affection on this excrescence of the Pinochet regime, and whether Tony Blair will try to implement the same " thing here.