The cost-cutting drive to shift benefit claimants from £96.85 a week Employment and Support Allowance to £65.45 Jobseeker's Allowance is throwing up some real horror stories.

And No, I don't mean claimants abusing the system. I'm referring to the woman recovering from breast cancer and awaiting another operation, or the lorry driver with his right arm in a cast, who were both passed fit to work by assessors of one of the private companies hired by the Government. Paid, no doubt, by results.

This hard-hitting TUC report exposes the other, darker side of the review of non-working claimants. It's about short-changing the poorest.

I bet it receives less public comment than lurid abuses waved in public by Ministers who speak of Tough Love but are merely Tough. Or the withdrawal of child benefit from the £44,000 higher tax brigade(I've written before about the unfairness of that too). Will Ed Miliband raise the TUC's evidence at PMQs? I'm not holding my breath.

Jay Rayner, son of Claire Rayner who sadly died this week, aged 79, replied after I Tweeted that Labour MP Chris Ruane made ghostly howling noises during PMQs when David Cameron was questioned about the agony aunt's famous "Tell David Cameron that if he screws up my beloved NHS I'll come back and bloody haunt him" threat before she passed away.

Jay, who writes for The Observer and is regularly on TV including The One Show and Top Chef Masters, and Tweets as @jayrayner1, said: "for what it's worth the Rayner thought the ghostly howling hillarious. And we needed a laugh." In a second Tweet, he said that should've been "Rayners" plural.

I record Jay's Tweets because I noticed on Twitter(where 140 characters prevent a post as long as this) a number of people were taking offence on behalf of the Rayner family and then today I was assured, by someone whose judgement I value, that the Rayner family was unhappy. Jay's comments suggest that's absolutely not so.

I've not spoken about this to Ruane, MP for the Vale of Clwyd,(or for that matter checked it was him making the noise though another Labour MP assured me it was) but as it happens I know he was an admirer of Claire Rayner's public stands and gutsy tackling of controversial issues.

Claire Rayner was a remarkable campaigner. I met her only once but was struck by a mischievous sense of humour. A series of fine tributes have been paid to her, including this one by Miriam Stoppard in my own paper, the Daily Mirror.

And it seems in the wrong was not the MP but those eager to take offence on behalf of the family. I sent my condolences to Jay Rayner. His mother's words will be much quoted in the coming years.

Tax avoiding, public service slashing, free market fanatics who lionise the Tea Leaf Party in the US like to portray the frightening mob as a spontaneous uprising of the little people against big government.

Which is why this investigation into how Big Oil billionaires are fuelling the insurgents with petrol dollars because they think it is good for corporate America is my favourite tale of the day.

I'd quite like a Tea Leaf Party over here to fragment the Right. Any loaded City boys out there fancy dipping into a bonus to set it up?

That was a clear win for Ed Miliband at the first PMQs bout with David Cameron. The new Labour leader triumphed IMHO for two simple reasons:

1) Ed Miliband picked the right issue. The tax-benefit trap in withdrawing Child Benefit from a higher tax one-earner home on £45,000 when(to use Miliband's figures) next door a couple on a joint £80,000 would keep it is ludicrous. After Income Tax and National Insurance a family with three kids on £33,000 would suffer a £2,500 Child Benefit hit. Cameron flannelled when asked it's fair. No wonder he did. It is not.

2) Ed Miliband sounded so bloody reasonable. No histrionics. A couple of digs at Cameron for not answering the questions or being straight but he avoided verbal pyrotechnics. And a good joke about how Cameron must've wished a BBC strike blacked out the Tory conference after the Child Benefit shambles dominated last week in Birmingham.

It is Cameron who will have to raise, or at least change, his game. Ed Miliband isn't aggressive Gordon Brown. A smooth PM will struggle to cope with someone appearing more reasonable than him.

David Cameron looked shaken at his delayed press conference earlier today when the PM announced that kidnapped British aid worker Linda Norgrove may have been killed in Afghanistan by a US grenade during a botched rescue operation.

Foreign Secretary William Hague was a little more reassured when he made a statement in the House of Commons and the mood of MPs was, as so often on these occasions, not to score political points though Tory MP Colonel Bob Stewart, a former US commander in Bosnia, raised a legitimate issue about whether the use of helicopters may have alerted the gang holding Ms Norgrove.

Responsibility her death, as Hague said, lies with Ms Norgrove's captors. But at least two big questions need to be answered.

The first is was the rescue operation necessary and why did it go wrong. The kidnappers weren't holding Ms Norgrove for her own good but was she in imminent danger? And, of course, all military operations are risky. Were avoidable mistakes, however, made in the confusion?

The second big question, which Shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper posed on an assured debut, is why the certainty over the weekend that a captor blew up himself and Ms Norgrove with a suicide vest. I saw Cameron nodding in agreement when Cooper asked for the explanation we now await. The explanation could be a genuine misunderstanding cleared up by a second viewing of footage taken during the mission. Or did the Foreign Office and No 10 stick their necks out on Saturday, dismissing caveats, to announce what they wanted to be believe? If that's the answer it'll be tricky for Hague and Cameron.

The Government version of events was being queried in Scotland and Afghanistan yesterday but we had to wait until noon today for Cameron to admit the mistake. If it was an attempted cover-up(and I've no evidence it was), the cover-up unravelled quickly.

Ed Miliband's shadow team announced tonight, including more than a dozen of Labour's 2010 intake...

Leader of the Opposition
Ed Miliband MP

PPS to the Leader of the Opposition
Anne McGuire MP
Chuka Umunna MP

Deputy Leader and Shadow Secretary of State for International Development
Harriet Harman MP
Mark Lazarowicz MP
Rushanara Ali MP

HM Treasury
Alan Johnson MP(Shadow Chancellor)
Angela Eagle MP(Shadow Chief Secretary)
David Hanson MP
Chris Leslie MP
Kerry McCarthy MP

Foreign and Commonwealth Office
Yvette Cooper MP
John Spellar MP
Wayne David MP
Stephen Twigg MP
Emma Reynolds MP

Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities
Yvette Cooper MP
Fiona MacTaggart MP

Home Office
Ed Balls MP
Vernon Coaker MP
Phil Woolas MP
Gerry Sutcliffe MP
Diana Johnson MP
Shabana Mahmood MP

Department for Education
Andy Burnham MP
Kevin Brennan MP
Sharon Hodgson MP
Iain Wright MP
Toby Perkins MP

Ministry of Justice
Sadiq Khan MP
Chris Bryant MP
Helen Goodman MP
Andy Slaughter MP
Rob Flello MP

Department for Work and Pensions
Douglas Alexander MP
Stephen Timms MP
Karen Buck MP
Margaret Curran MP
Rachel Reeves MP

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
John Denham MP
Gareth Thomas MP
Ian Lucas MP
Gordon Banks MP
Gordon Marsden MP
Nia Griffith MP
Chi Onwurah MP

Department of Health
John Healey MP
Diane Abbott MP
Emily Thornberry MP
Derek Twigg MP
Liz Kendall MP

Department for Communities and Local Government
Caroline Flint MP
Alison Seabeck MP
Barbara Keeley MP
Jack Dromey MP
Chris Williamson MP

Ministry of Defence
Jim Murphy MP
Kevan Jones MP
Russell Brown MP
Michael Dugher MP
Gemma Doyle MP

Department for Energy and Climate Change
Meg Hillier MP
Huw Irranca-Davies
Luciana Berger MP

Shadow Leader of the House of Commons
Hilary Benn MP
Helen Jones MP

Department for Transport
Maria Eagle MP
Jim Fitzpatrick MP
Andrew Gwynne MP
John Woodcock MP

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Mary Creagh MP
Willie Bain MP
Jamie Reed MP
Peter Soulsby MP

Northern Ireland
Shaun Woodward MP
Eric Joyce MP

Scotland Office
Ann McKechin MP
Tom Greatrex MP

Wales
Peter Hain MP
Owen Smith MP

Culture, Media and Sport
Ivan Lewis MP
Tessa Jowell MP(Olympics)
Ian Austin MP
Gloria De Piero MP

Shadow Leader of the House of Lords
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon

Cabinet office
Liam Byrne MP
Jon Trickett MP
Roberta Blackman-Woods MP

Law Officers
Baroness Scotland(Shadow Attorney-General)
Catherine McKinnell MP(Shadow Solicitor-General)

Whips Office (Commons)
Rosie Winterton MP(Chief Whip)
Alan Campbell MP(Deputy Chief Whip)
Tony Cunningham MP(Pairing Whip)
Lyn Brown MP
Mark Tami MP
David Wright MP
Stephen Pound MP
David Hamilton MP
Dave Anderson MP
Angela C Smith MP
Phil Wilson MP
Lillian Greenwood MP
Jonathan Reynolds MP
Graham Jones MP

Whips Office (Lords)
Lord Bassam of Brighton(Lords Chief Whip)

Ed Miliband's fluffed his first big call. Appointing Alan Johnson as Labour Shadow Chancellor is to stick with the Alistair Darling line on halving the deficit when Labour lost the election. The bold move was to put Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper in the job and shift the Labour position to slower cuts to keep the economy recovering. As this week's Tory turmoil over a £1bn cut in child benefit proved, the £83bn cuts to be unveiled by George Osborne on October 20 will be deeply unpopular as well as economically flawed. Osborne will be unable to believe his luck. Again.

My Guardianista friends who backed Ed Miliband as the radical new dawn over Labour are putting on a brave face. As are trade union leaders fed up the new leader repeatedly condemns strikes yet to happen after they persuaded individual members he was the workers' champion.

Labour's opponents painted Miliband as Red Ed the Left-wing firebrand to hurt the party. Miliband's backers actually hoped he was Red Ed. Both are disappointed, though his enemies will be happier than well-wishers that he's Timid Ed.

I'm re-reading extracts from David Cameron's speech distributed by the Tories last night. Before the PM gets on his hind legs, in the interests of honesty and transparency I suggest he makes the following changes:

Cam will say: "It will be the doers and grafters, the inventors and the entrepreneurs who get this economy going."
Cam should say: "My spending cuts risk choking the economic recovery and I want back £2,500 child benefit for any doer and grafter with three kids who gets to £44k."

Cam will say: "Think of the man who gets up and leaves the house before dawn to go out and clean windows. Think of the woman who sits up late into the night trying to make the figures add up to make sure she can pay her staff."
Cam should say: "And I want their child benefit too unless the window cleaner and late night lady are together and cap their aspirations at £43k each."

Cam will say: "So we are acting to build a more entrepreneurial economy. Tens of thousands of university and apprenticeship places and a new generation of technical schools."
Cam should say: "University fees will be raised to £10,000 but we are confident that will not deter the sons and daughters of bankers and hedge-fund managers. Everyone else will find their station in life."

Cam will say: "For too long, we have measured success in tackling poverty by the size of the cheque we give people. We say: let's measure our success by the chance we give."
Cam should say: "The unemployed squander what I believe is a princely £65.45 Jobseekers' Allowance. I know there are 10 people on benefits for every vacancy but by talking about chances we Tories can blame them for their unemployment."

Cam will say: "Remember last year? When you stood up to show how angry you were about the injustice of some low paid single mothers going out to work and losing 96p for every extra pound they earned?"
Cam should say: "Sit down. A mum or dad of three earning an extra pound and losing £2,500 in child benefit is the most regressive reform ever of the tax-benefit system. But do not be disheartened. Soon those on housing benefit claimants will be losing the roof over their heads. There'll be millions of people worse off than you, my Tory friends."

Home Secretary, Theresa May, didn't know in advance and the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, blames meeja pressure for Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, blurting out on Monday that the Conservative-led coalition plans to axe child benefit for higher earners and create a glaring discrepancy in the tax-benefit system. After three days of flak and flip-flopping, other Tories maintain it was a carefully calibrated operation to prove David Cameron will be tough on higher earners as well as the low paid. If this was a successful strategy, I'd hate to see a failure.
his ship.

Andrew Neil would love to witness the Tory post-mortem. So would I. And watch whoever conceived such a stupid strategy handed his/her P45. On Monday morning, after Osborne had unveiled a plan to let a family with a joint income of £86,000 keep child benefit yet remove it from a single earner family on £44,000, the Cons were briefing it would be overshadowed in the Chancellor's speech by the cap on benefits. How wrong they were.

I'm uncomfortable with higher earners are winning a voice across the media when many newspapers and much of Radio-TV ignored deeper cuts for lower earners. National journalists are(I hope my employer doesn't read this bit) relatively well paid. Those lower earners may have taken their revenge in the Sun poll finding 83% think "higher incomes" should lose child benefit, although 46% think the way it will be imposed is unfair(41% think it's unacceptable).

Yet the child benefit row has played an important role in securing an admission from Osborne that his cuts hit lower earners hardest. In June's Budget, imposing £11bn of cuts, the Chancellor claimed: "Everyone will pay something but the people at the bottom of the income scale will pay proportionately less than those at the top. This is a progressive Budget,"

Proportionately less? Progressive? Contrast that with what Osborne said in yesterday's email to Tory MPs: "I made £11 billion of savings from other parts of the welfare system, many of which affected people on lower incomes."

It's now "many" instead of "proportionately less". The cat's out of the bag. The poor and lower paid will pick up the tab for cuts they can ill-afford to pay. And this week will prove a picnic compared with what's coming down the line on Cuts Day, October 20.

Until a few moments ago I didn't really believe that Albanians loved Norman Wisdom who has sadly died, aged 95. I thought it was spin or an urban myth. Tory MP Mark Pritchard produced the proof. The Wrekin MP, who is a big cheese on the backbench 1922 committee, is escorting a group of foreign Parliamentarians around the Conservative jamboree in Birmingham including once Gerti Bodgani, an MP for the Democratic Party of Albania.

We could've discussed Tirana traffic, the Balkans, the country's application for EU membership or Norman Wisdom. So I asked Bodgani about the British comic and the MP, who has perfect English(I lack Albanian), knew more about Wisdom than I including the Pipkin character and Keep off the Grass.

"I loved him as a kid," said Bogdani. "He was one of the few outside comedians we were allowed to watch under Communism. He used to visit Albania a lot and people will be very sad that he's died."

Sorry to have doubted you, Albania.