Tories do like him, I guess this is the converse of Ken Clarke being popular amongst Labour members. I think he is very persuasive because he is so soft spoken and polite. His audience finds it difficult to challenge him as it makes them feel they are mugging an OAP.

Great stuff indeed- but can we file this along with Pope is Catholic news. No change for our Frank from the kind of rubbish that saw him fired as Minister for Welfare all those years ago.

And cf. Sion Simon.

This was the man who was going to modernise the welfare state, and yet he cannot present an accurate evaluation of New Deal’s performance from his own statistics.

When you think about it, Field and Letwin would make an apt pair of bookends for Cameron - the illiterate to my right, the innumerate to my left.

[What about New Deal beginning on day one of unemployment… why?]

is as you say asinine because we are dealing with a stock which is the difference of two flows here (the flow into youth unemployment and the flow out); you can’t fill a bucket any faster by moving it closer to the tap.

Field is popular among Tories with a background in financial services because he is the big advocate of compulsory pensions saving, by the way.

Thanks D-Squared - it’s a relief to know that I got the basics right and haven’t made an arse of myself.

As might be obvious from the title - there’s more than hint of influence from Levitt’s Freakonomics in this. Had I not read it, I might not have thought of going after the population demographics as means of checking the validity of Field’s arguments.

Many years later the CLP tried to have him removed as a PPC (this was in the Kinnock years shortly after (or maybe during) the removal of Hatton and his Militant cronies from Liverpool).

I knew the people responsable in the Birkenhead CLP where not Militant. They were left of the party, but not one where members of Militant.

They had their memberships withdrawn and Field stood yet again.

The sooner Frank Field finally declares his true colours, the better as far as I am concerned. Good riddance.