The politics behind the child benefit cuts

A Treasury source insisted to me last night, choosing his words very carefully, that the decision on child benefit was taken “in the last couple of weeks.” It only adds to the brittleness amongst some who consider themselves in the top half of the Cabinet but who only got to hear about the decision at the last minute and who know that Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander knew about and were shaping the policy quite a bit before that.

Anyway,  the main thing quite a few folk are taking away from the child benefit saga here is that even when an announcement on cuts comes out at a time, place and manner entirely of the leadership’s choosing, their control of the message looks a little shakey. The PM’s talk of spraying more state aid to married couples in the form of a married couples tax break going right up to top income earners looked very thin … and it would feel pretty thin in terms of money that would actually come back into the household income. “They’ll have to do better than this on the 20th,” one minister said to me last night.

But Tory high command insists that you only get public attention when there’s a row. That’s true up to a point but you want the row to be on the right terrain. They are trying to pummell home a message about fairness and no longer being the nasty Party by going for top rate benefits, but a big chunk of the row has centred on “unfairness” and anomalies.

At one point last night a senior Cabinet minister sounded to me a bit like those around Ed Miliband who have been arguing for months that the Blair/Brown New Labour model misjudged where middle England incomes really were and that the £44,000 threshold would seem like an unachievable dreamland to millions. It’s a rewriting of the nostrums about voters identifying themselves with aspiration and where they’re heading not where they’re coming from. But there’s no arguing that everybody has heard the policy.

A senior Tory Cabinet minister told me last night that the party couldn’t really shift its policy on Winter Fuel allowances because the party leader’s pre-election words had just left no wriggle room. I suggested it all sounded like benefit decisions were made clustered round a video player on playback squirming at past promises and I thought the Tory Cabinet minister blanched. The child benefit decision and the logic it was wrapped in whipped away the intellectual underpinning for winter fuel allowance but it is left hanging there because of past pledges, in particular the exchanges at St Stephen’s Club in Westminster at the last of David Cameron’s monthly opposition leader press conferences (on 23rd March).

You can hear one of the most expensive bits of politicking ever here – the questioner is the BBC’s James Landale.

And you wonder why David Cameron hasn’t held a Prime Ministerial press conference since the Rose Garden event with Nick Clegg.