At this rate Labour won’t even be a debating society in five years time

The phoney war continues. While Labour searches for its next Michael Foot, the party’s stand-in boss, Harriet Harman, seems keen to lose the 2020 election as soon as possible. Some argue Ed Miliband has already performed that task. Either way, defeat is the only thing Labour does efficiently nowadays.

Ms Harman attacked the PM’s plan to abolish a policy that many hail as Gordon Brown’s Worst Ever Idea: tax credits. These mean that thousands of Whitehall scribblers deposit cash with workers who then return the money, via thousands more scribblers, to the government which never owned it in the first place. Labour loves the N Korean ambience of this system because it turns every citizen into a state vassal. But it’s an expensive, corrupting wheeze that licences rich firms to pay low wages.

Hattie claimed that Cameron’s reforms would cost poor families money. She asked the PM not to rob poverty-stricken kids (she actually said, ‘rob’) and added: ‘He doesn’t have to budget but many families do.’