spin

I notice that my dear colleague Tom reckons Francis Maude is the intellectual power behind the government - and that'll be why we're in this fix. My ongoing project to analyse the government's disclosures of meetings with external lobbies came to similar conclusions with a quite limited data set as far back as October.

Does Iain Duncan Smith have any clear plan as to how to find perhaps as many as a million and a half full-time equivalent voluntary jobs? Has he got a budget to fund voluntary organisations expanding to achieve this? Have they been consulted in detail?

You can probably guess. Is this probably a vacuous sunday-for-monday eye-catching initiative? Yes.

Two themes come together - the Telegraph being frozen out by the Coalition as not being trustworthy and wholly behind the idea of a Cameroonie/Orange Book alliance and the frequently mentioned propensity for leakiness.  Notably this is Stephen Glover writing in the Independent, likewise no friend of the Axis Of Rupert approach to media management:

If the coalition is indeed going to deliberately inflate the public sector deficit as an all-purpose justifier - the Gideon/Fraser Nelson strategy - a key element in what they will have to get the OBR to accept will be the treatment of Private Finance Initiative/Public-Private Partnership projects. Certainly, complaining about AirTanker would give that impression.