They say turkeys never vote for Christmas. But MPs are likely to wave through new rules which force them to disclose any relatives on their payroll. The move, a response to the Derek Conway scandal, was announced by the Committee on Standards and Privileges in a press release on February 5.

With all leaders of the three main parties urging greater transparency - hoping to head off further damaging revelations - the move is likely to pass through the Commons unopposed when a vote takes place in March.

Interestingly, the members of the CSP still haven’t quite decided how the new disclosures will work. There will be a new column on the register of members’ interests for them to report any family connections. But it probably won’t reveal how much these secretaries and researchers are being paid.

And MPs won’t necessarily have to disclose the names of the relatives. The committee is mulling the pros and cons of whether members will have to write "my daughter", for example, or actually name her.

The real grey area in this will be lovers/"friends"/ex-lovers. My understanding is that MPs will only have to name relatives and maybe their longterm partners. If an MP is, ahem, "courting" his secretary or researcher he will not have to declare this on the register. That could still prove a can of worms some years down the line.

The problem with eye-catching government initiatives to save cash is that they often - um - cost money. Big money.

Bureaucrats charged with shifting thousands of civil servants out of London (the Lyons Review) soon found that it was not so easy to move staff out of their offices. Getting out of leases can involve multi-million pound payments to landlords, for example.
<!–
–>And so it is with the Gershon Review, where ministers agreed to wave the scythe over the civil service’s enormous workforce. The plan is to remove 84,000 posts in four years. This would reverse the huge growth in the public sector payroll under the Labour government.

Since Gershon more than £430m has been paid out in redundancy to civil servants, according to figures put together by Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman.

“The government has thrown £500m of taxpayers’ cash at civil servants to pay them not to work,” says Lord Oakeshott. “The costs to the taxpayer are only too clear. The benefits are vague and stretching into the future.”

The Treasury says the idea is eventually to save £20bn in the long term. But why hire so many civil servants in the first place? The blame must surely lie with the current government in the early days of its administration.

And has anyone stopped to ask how much it would cost if some or many of the de-employed civil servants stay out of work and on benefits?

These are dangerous times for the government. Alistair Darling, chancellor, is in serious political trouble and the sound of muttering about his performance can be heard swelling around Whitehall.

Gordon Brown’s spokesman on Tuesday repeated the view that it was "total garbage" that the prime minister had any doubts about the performance of his neighbour.

But there are some senior figures close to Mr Brown who are questioning how Mr Darling managed to spectacularly damage the government’s relations with business with last year’s pre-budget report.

When this sort of criticism seeps into the political gossip machine, it can be unsettling. When it relates to the way in which the Brown camp sees the Chancellor of the Exchequer it threatens to be highly damaging to the government. Ben Brogan in his Daily Mail blog points out what is at stake.

The fact is that Mr Darling’s pre-budget report - with its capital gains tax reforms and plans to hit non-doms with a £30,000 levy - was hastily drawn up with an autumn general election in mind.

It might have played well in a three week election campaign, but it has gone down disastrously with business and the City. This is the very constituency which Mr Brown - through ten years as chancellor - struggled so hard to win over.

But if the detail in the PBR was Mr Darling’s responsibility, the plan to tax rich foreigners and hit private equity bosses through CGT reform was Mr Brown’s. It was the PM who toyed with the early election; it was Mr Brown who told his chancellor to rush out these plans to counter Tory moves in the same area.

They are in this together. My guess is that Mr Brown will not move his chancellor in a summer reshuffle - a move which would smack of sheer panic - and that Mr Darling will continue to play a role as a human shield deflecting criticism from Number 10.

Ed Balls, children’s minister, is talked about as a chancellor-in-waiting. But does Mr Brown really want his closest ally to stand in the line of fire at such a dangerous political and economic moment.

Inventive students have exploited a loophole in the education system to get thousands of pounds towards food and rent - while detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

It emerged today that £500,000 has been paid to prisoners in student grants and loans towards food and rent thanks to a glitch in the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2000. David Willetts, shadow universities secretary, is outraged: "The latest in a long line of Labour fiascos," he says.

In a world where  HM Revenue and Customs can waylay the personal details of 25m families, is he really that surprised?

We have just heard that John McCain, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has pulled out of a planned meeting with Gordon Brown on Friday. As this was only announced by the prime minister’s spokesman this morning, it is bound to cause some embarrassment at No 10.

People are inevitably going to speculate about whether the prime minister is worth seeing. But we suspect the real reason for the cancellation has less to do with Mr McCain’s willingness to shoot the breeze with Mr Brown, and more to do with Super Tuesday. Had Mr McCain’s main rivals dropped out, he would have had the time and space to hobnob with the statesmen of Europe. But with Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee clinging on, it may look somewhat presumptive to leave the US on a overseas jaunt. 

This is a reasonable excuse. But it does not explain why the trip was announced in the first place. The prime minister’s spokesman told journalists about the trip at about 11am this morning, which is about 6am on the US East coast. It is possible that No 10 were chatting to McCain aides in the early hours of the morning, after the primary results were in, about whether to tell the world’s press about the visit. A more likely scenario is that the trip was arranged some time ago, and Downing Street jumped the gun on the announcement.

One politician who will be relieved by this bungle is David Cameron. To the obvious consternation of some of his aides, the Straight Talk Express was passing through London without stopping for the Tory party leader.

Was it fair for this blog to compare Caroline Flint’s comments yesterday with the Tories (eg Tebbit) of the 1980s? Not necessarily.

I’ve gone back to Margaret Thatcher’s famous "no such thing as society" (20 years ago now) and there are clear parallels with Flint’s nowt for owt speech to the Fabian Society on Tuesday.

This is what Thatcher told Women’s Own in October 1987.

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation

Perhaps Baroness Thatcher’s views are due for a degree of revisionism. One Labour backbencher told me the other day that the former Tory leader’s greatest regret was that she had expected the entrepreneurs of the 1980s - who had benefited from her policies - to give back more to charity/society. The Iron Lady told him, apparently, that she was surprised that the newly-created rich had not been more philanthropic; as was the case in the US.

The Guardian would seem a strange venue for Caroline Flint, new housing minister, to tell council tenants: If you want a house, go find a job. In her first interview in the job Flint has attacked the culture of "no one works around here" on public-owned housing estates.

Flint’s comments are unlikely to go down well with that newspaper’s left-leaning readership. Unison, the union, is among those who believe the minister is guilty of "stigmatising" the poor.

The obvious rationale is that this is part of Labour’s attempt to sound tough on the issue of benefits; a fight-back against a raft of policy ideas from Chris Grayling, the Tories’ work and pensions frontbencher.

Flint (pictured left) said she was concerned about the rising proportion of unemployed people within social housing. She proposed that those living in such properties should seek work as part of their tenancy agreements.

The comments may confuse those who believed the whole point of subsidised housing was to support the vulnerable in society; whether unemployed, elderly, frail or sick.

Grant Shapps, shadow housing minister, said councils had a "statutory duty" to house homeless families with children. "What we’ve heard is classic Labour spin: designed to sound tough, but is in reality meaningless."

Shelter, the housing charity, meanwhile said the idea would sent the country back to the "Victorian era" and would destroy families and communities.

Flint, in her defence, has stressed that those incapable of seeking work would be excluded from any new measures.

But former Tory minister Norman Tebbit (left), who famously called for the unemployed to get on their bikes to find work, would probably approve.

It’s 8pm and Frank Field has just emerged from the weekly Parliamentary Labour Party meeting with the threat of disciplinary action hanging over him. His supposed wrongdoing? Lending his name to a campaign for unofficial referendums on the Lisbon Treaty run by a group called "I Want A Referendum" (Iwar).

Iwar are spending £300,000 carrying out a handful of ballots (asking if people agree with the treaty) in marginal constituencies around the UK.

Field (pictured left), along with Gisela Stuart and Kate Hoey, has been hauled over the coals by Geoff Hoon, Labour’s chief whip for stepping out of line.

Tonight they were referred to the Parliamentary Committee, a body elected by the PLP, which will by Wednesday decide on any appropriate punishment.

Field’s point is that Labour (along with the Tories and Lib Dems) promised at the last election to have a plebiscite on the European Constitution, which has since morphed into the Lisbon agreement.

He doesn’t sound very conciliatory. "I said the idea of trying to maintain an election pledge by having mini-referendums is nothing compared to the general drift of this government," he says.

Incidentally, I asked Gwyneth Dunwoody - another Eurosceptic Labour MP - about the issue this morning. Her reply: She would have been in trouble along with the other three if only she had been sufficiently "organised"  to join the Iwar campaign.

I’ve been tipping Tony Blair to be the first "president of Europe" since 2002 - when the creation of the job was just a twinkle in his eye - so I’m delighted the former PM is taking soundings about whether the post will be worthy of his political talents. No doubting his self-confidence, is there?

Back in 2002 I remember being told that Mr Blair thought the creation of a full-time president of the European Council - the supreme body of the EU - was the most important thing to get written into the new EU constitution, now rebranded the Treaty of Lisbon.

What’s more aides to the PM told me over a coffee in Strasbourg that this was a job in which he had "a keen personal interest". The story I wrote off the back of this briefing spawned a brilliant follow-up by Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun, who wrote Mr Blair would be a Napoleonic figure, living in a huge (yet to be built) presidential palace.

I always had my doubts whether a former British PM would get the job, simply because I couldn’t imagine a French president agreeing to let a Brit stride around the world stage speaking for Europe. But since Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be almost as much in love with TB as he is with Carla Bruni, that no longer seems a problem.

If Silvio Berlusconi (Mr Blair’s old holiday pal) gets back into power in Italy, consider it a done deal - if Mr Blair wants ths job.

He apparently wants to know exactly what it entails. Will it be simply to act as a messenger boy for the EU’s 27 leaders on the off-chance they can agree a common position. Or will he have real clout in areas such as trade and foreign policy?

It seems to me that the first person to hold the job (which could be created in 2009) will define the job. If it’s Tony Blair it will be a big job; if it’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister, I suspect it will be a smaller one.

Will Gordon Brown accept it? I can’t imagine a British PM blocking a British candidate for such a job and - in any case - I hear suggestions the two old rivals are getting along better these days.

What about Cherie? She would obviously like Tony to rake in a few more millions, but by 2009 he’ll already be well on his way to his first £10m thanks to a book deal and various banking jobs. Being president of Europe is unlikely to lower his future earnings potential.

So go for it Tony. You might finally be able to do what you signally failed to do while in Number 10 - explain to the British public what is the point of our membership of the EU. And I’ll be able to rip out that old story from my 2002 cuttings book and say that I told you so.

It is rare and wonderful thing to hear a close confidant of Gordon Brown answer the "vision thing". Ever since the prime minister ducked out of calling an early election, citing his "vision for change", the question has been: have we seen it yet?

When asked, Mr Brown usually trots out the same legislative programme he outlined before the election decision. So it was intriguing to hear Douglas "wee Dougie" Alexander, one of Mr Brown’s closest political advisers, give a fuller response in an interview with the BBC on Sunday. He basically says a big vision is made up of small steps. It certainly has a whiff of self-justification — after all, Mr Alexander has not been popular with many Labour MPs since Gordon Brown’s fortunes turned. Here is the full transcript.

ANDREW MARR: What about the condition of the Party generally? We’ve had this report from Progress which is one of the sort of left-wing think tanks saying basically there needs to be a much clearer sense of direction and a much clearer idea about what New Labour is for or you are all doomed.

DOUGLAS ALEXANDER: I certainly don’t think we’re all doomed. I think instead we have to recognise there’s two challenges for any government in these circumstances. One is, how do you deal with events  that inevitably come up in the day to day business of government. But secondly do you have that longer term plan and that longer term agenda. And I think we do.

Whether it’s on issues like social housing - I was in my constituency on Friday. The first question I was asked was about affordable housing for young people. Whether it’s about the challenge of making the Health Service more accessible to people given the hours people are working.

It’s those practical steps,  the kind of discipline of the small steps of progress in government that I think actually over time  reveals the rhythm and the character of a government.

The last sentence reminded me of a politician who is having some similar vision troubles across the Atlantic. In her first senate speech, Hillary Clinton said:

"I learned some valuable lessons about the political process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done."

This approach is classic Clintonian strategy. Bill Clinton’s State of the Union speeches were typically a crushingly boring laundry list of mini-initiatives to please small sections of the electorate.

Mr Alexander is a noted follower of US politics and indeed takes advice from Clinton pollsters such as Mark Penn and Stan Greenberg. I’m sure he will be interested to see whether this "small steps" strategy prevails on Super Tuesday.