The Gurkha blame game gets resolved

Pete has already flagged up Rachel Sylvester’s column, but there’s one line in it about the Gurkhas that particularly caught my attention:

“I am told that ministers agreed in a Cabinet sub-committee that the issue should be resolved, but they were overruled by No10.”

On Friday, there was a huge blame game going on about who was responsible for the Government getting itself into such a predictable political and presentational mess. Some briefed that it was Jacqui Smith’s fault because her department was in charge of the legislation, others said Darling and the Treasury were to blame because they had said it was too expensive, and there was whispering that John Hutton should, as Defence Secretary, have pushed far harder. But now it turns out that the problem was, as it so often is, the Prime Minister.