Cunning plan of robbing Auntie to pay Granny

Sam Leith general passes them in the corridor — oof ! — they make off with his lunch money.

Oldies are very important to politicians because there are lots of them, they vote and they have (overall) much more money than young people. Also — unlike hoodies, students, single mothers, scroungers, migrants and so on — there is political capital in sentimentali sing them. We all think of apple-cheeked grannies and avuncular dispensers of Werther’s Originals. What’s more, we all expect to become them. So as a politician, even if you know the real and unanswerable problem with the welfare bill is an ageing population, it ’s a l ways easier to announce another c rackdown on benefit fraud than address it.

So we have this absurd situation where one benefit for old folks (free telly) is being withdrawn to help pay

The Tories might not consider paying £145.50 for wealthy oldies to watch Cash in the Attic sustainable

for another one (pensions); and yet the conversation is not about provision for the elderly but about getting tough with the BBC. With the big stick of charter renewal coming up and in the face of an already hostile media, it’s a brave Beeb indeed that will say: get knotted — why should we pay your debts for you? That would be all too easily framed as the sneering liberal elites of the BBC turning their back on the generation that won the war.

It’s not so much robbing Peter to pay Paul as robbing Auntie to pay Granny, with the agreeable side-benefit of pleasing the BBC’s ideological opponents in the Chancellor’s own part y. It’s a rotten trick, and a cunning one, and it will almost certainly work.