Isabel Hardman

Channel 4 screens the second episode of its Benefits Street documentary tonight, as a petition calling for it to be taken off the air has gained over 30,000 signatures. Labour MPs are trying to use it as an example of the way the media, and by extension the Conservatives, stigmatise benefit claimants. So perhaps it was only natural that a Conservative MP would do the same and use the programme to make a political point during Work and Pensions Questions in the Commons this afternoon. Philip Davies asked Iain Duncan Smith whether he too had been struck by 'the number of people on there who manage to combine complaining about welfare reforms whilst being able to afford to buy copious amounts of cigarettes, have lots of tattoos done and watch Sky TV on the obligatory widescreen television?

Did Nick Clegg recite his entire Andrew Marr interview from memory? The Deputy Prime Minister managed to cram so many soundbites into his answers that anyone wondering what the months in the run-up to the 2015 generation election will be like will have sunk into a pit of misery at how dull and formulaic it is all going to be. Thank goodness for those trouble-making Tory MPs with their letters who are at least trying to make things a bit more unpredictable, eh?

Number 10 has appointed Tobias Ellwood has the Prime Minister's parliamentary adviser on this year's Nato summit, Coffee House has learned. Ellwood, who is currently PPS to Jeremy Hunt, will work as a link between MPs, peers and the Prime Minister. The summit will take place in Newport, Wales, on 4 and 5 September 2014. This is interesting, not just because Number 10 is still making strenuous efforts to improve the Prime Minister's relations with the rest of his party (although in my Telegraph column today I examine whether one such effort, the Number 10 policy board, is really all it's cracked up to be). Ellwood was PPS to Liam Fox when he was Defence Secretary until Fox resigned from his job in October 2011.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_9_January_2014_v4.mp3" title="David Goodhart and Tim Finch on Labour's immigration woes"] Listen [/audioplayer]Victor Spirescu came to Britain last week looking for work washing cars, but seems to have landed himself with a career in broadcasting. The Romanian, who arrived on the first flight into London after restrictions on workers from Bulgaria and Romania ended on 1 January, has now spent the days since touring studios and newspaper offices, obliging those who wish to talk to him about his new life. Those who bump into him as he weaves his way across television studios have the impression that he wishes he’d caught a slightly later flight.

PMQs was a rightly sombre affair, coming as it did only a few hours after the death of Labour MP Paul Goggins was announced. It has been striking to hear many MPs of all political persuasions pay tribute to Goggins as a 'decent' and 'kind' man, and those tributes were echoed in the Chamber. These two qualities are rarely trumpeted in politics and yet when someone does possess them, they have a profound impact on those around them. Ed Miliband split his questions between flooding and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). His first tranche, on flooding, was still rather sombre and the Labour leader and the Prime Minister both sought consensus.

If George Osborne and David Cameron did fire the starting gun for the 2015 election campaign over the weekend and yesterday, then what will that campaign look like? Labour wants to say it will be a nasty campaign because this means they can talk about heir favourite bogeyman Lynton Crosby and Ed Miliband's own emphasis on personal decency. And privately Tories in the know accept that it is going to be a rough and dirty campaign on all sides. But in the past two days we've also seen a glimpse of what it is going to be like between the two coalition parties, and frankly, it all looks rather exhausting. George Osborne pledges to cut welfare further. An hour later Nick Clegg describes it as unbalanced. This morning we've got Vince Cable muttering about the Tories' net migration target.

We already knew that the Chancellor would focus on welfare as a field ripe for further cuts in his speech in Birmingham today. When he delivered that speech, George Osborne announced that the Treasury's current forecasts suggest that £12 billion of further welfare cuts are needed in the first two years of the next Parliament, and framed this as a challenge to all parties not to let voters down by refusing to cut benefits. He said: 'So when you see people on the telly who say that welfare can't be cut anymore - or, even worse, promising they will reverse the changes we've already made and increase housing benefit - ask yourself this: way public services would they cut instead? What taxes they would put up in their place?

One of the most significant things about David Cameron's Sunday Times interview today was something he didn't say. The Prime Minister made maintaining the triple lock for pensions for the next Parliament 'the first plank of the next general election manifesto', but he didn't make any 'read-my-lips' promises about anything else related to those of pensionable age. Why not? Did this mean the Conservatives are going to drop their support for universal pensioner benefits such as the winter fuel payment and free bus passes? His interview on Marr suggested that this could well happen.

Beyond the slew of amusing 'No man's hand' photos of the beleaguered François Hollande trying and failing to find support from other European leaders, there are a number of implications for the British political scene of the beleaguered French leader's latest crisis, in which he has been forced to admit that taxes have been too heavy while watching his country's manufacturing sector fall behind that of Greece and borrowing costs rise. The first is that David Cameron has a perfect case study of what happens when you stick your fingers in your ears and repeatedly say there is an alternative.