Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s speech on reducing the deficit has attracted a fair bit of criticism for not telling us very much that’s new. It was supposed to be a Big Speech, and Big Speech normally means Big Announcement, but there wasn’t one. There wasn’t even really any bigger attempt to tell us what Labour would do after the General Election. The Labour leader spent a fair chunk of the question-and-answer session afterwards telling the audience that he had been ‘clear’, which is what politicians end up having to say when they haven’t been clear, often deliberately. But it’s unfair to say that this was a useless speech as it did articulate better than previously the Labour leader’s basic vision for the economy.

Today’s Treasury Questions was a bit odd, not least because neither George Osborne nor Ed Balls were there, so everyone seemed to be quite keen to get the thing over with. Labour’s latest line of attack is to force Treasury ministers into ruling out or obfuscating over whether or not a Tory government would put up VAT after the General Election. Here is the first exchange, between Shabana Mahmood and David Gauke: Shabana Mahmood: 'The Minister has failed to rule out another tax cut for the richest 1% of earners in our country. As he signalled in his answer, the Prime Minister has made £7 billion-worth of unfunded tax promises for the next Parliament.

If the Coalition started cohabiting earlier this year, it has now moved into the phase where the two parties are posting mean things about each other on Facebook and trying to get the kids to take sides. George Osborne has a grump in today’s Sunday Times about the emphasis that the Lib Dems want to place on tax rises to plug the gap after the 2015 election. He writes: ‘The Liberal Democrats are now arguing with themselves, so it’s hard to work out exactly what they think. While they sign up to deficit reduction, they want more tax rises rather than spending cuts. But they shouldn’t pretend to people that the sums required can be achieved by their homes tax alone.

A lot of political types are very cross with the ‘biased media’ today. Ukip is currently the most aerated because some journalists ‘fabricated’ (which is today synonymous with ‘transcribed’) some remarks Nigel Farage made about whether or not restaurants are right to tell women to put napkins over themselves when breastfeeding. Number 10 is very angry with the BBC’s Norman Smith because he talked about the Road to Wigan Pier which is not an OK way of describing the public spending cuts still to come (but the IFS describing them as ‘grotesque’ and ‘colossal’ apparently is). Labour has been annoyed for months that journalists keep pointing out mistakes that Ed Miliband makes.

George Osborne has in the past year assembled a coterie of advisers to help him become more human, more stylish, thinner and more in touch with voters. But this morning it seemed he’d turned to his Cabinet colleague Iain Duncan Smith for media training before popping up on the Radio 4's Today programme, as the Chancellor quickly became tetchy when asked the ‘wrong’ sort of questions. He gets angry about 7 minutes in...

One notable absence on the government frontbench during the Autumn Statement today was Nick Clegg, who is in Cornwall today. The Deputy Prime Minister is in Cornwall today, visiting a number of different places, all of which seem to be in Lib Dem constituencies. A source close to Clegg points out that he already knew what was in the Statement, that Danny Alexander was there, adding: ‘He just sits there so he would rather get out in the country and talk to people about what the Autumn Statement means for them.’ It’s quite impressive that it has taken Clegg so many years of sitting on the government frontbench and trying to look interested without being able to say anything before concluding that not being there might not be the worst thing.