Cabinet Reconstruction

Cutting sickness and disability benefits is not a hard choice. It is a very, very easy choice, and all the more shameful for that. Universal Credit for those who had been found permanently medically unfit for work, a process so arduous that it not uncommonly kills people, has already been halved for new claimants and frozen until 2030. We are expected either to welcome that as the Government's compromise with Labour MPs, or to scorn even that as a capitulation to them.

We have seen nothing yet. After he had failed to persuade Gordon Brown to let him charge 26.8 per cent interest on crisis loans, James Purnell resigned from Brown's Cabinet as part of an attempt to replace him with David Miliband. Miliband is now touted as a potential returnee to the Foreign Office, presumably by means of a peerage. But if he were to contest a by-election, then he should face either a Chagossian or a victim of his torture, and the former would command broader public sympathy. All in all, Andy Burnham is showing us who he is. Some of us were so old that we already knew.