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Cabinet ministers took offence when David Cameron's plans for welfare reform were printed in a Sunday newspaper under a photograph of Karen Matthews, the Dewsbury kidnap mother. "How do we stop them all turning into this?" the headline asked of Britain's 5 million benefit claimants.
Labour indignation that Cameron appeared to be tarring all claimants sounded genuine: proof that the Tory leader is just a shallow tactician who doesn't understand most people's lives, according to one senior minister.
In truth, a high degree of convergence now exists between Labour and Tory thinking on welfare reform after a decade in which Tony Blair's early promises to "think the unthinkable" rapidly succumbed to wary caution when Labour MPs rebelled.
Business lobbies like the CBI are now on side, the TUC chiefly anxious that claimants should not simply be bullied into low-paid work.
So when James Purnell, Labour's eighth welfare supremo since 1997, who took over from the wounded Peter Hain 11 months ago, officially unveiled Labour's third stage of reform yesterday, his Tory shadow, Chris Grayling, both criticised the package and said he would back most of it. Businessman David Freud's analysis in 2006 (when John Hutton held Purnell's job) is the key text.
To camouflage consensus Grayling clipped young Purnell's ear for testing out his new ideas first - "too many pilots" after 11 years in power, he said. Yet New Labour's weakness has often been just the opposite: not enough evidence-based policy-making.
Rightwing thinktanks like Civitas are already warning that Purnell's plan for "personalised conditionality" - claimants will have to prepare for the world of work in return for personal attention and continuing benefits - may prove ineffectual if all they have to do is update their CV or look up a babysitter's phone number. That is dismissed as defeatist talk.
The more urgent critique as Britain slides deeper into recession came from leftwing MPs, progressive tanks and poverty campaigners.
Can hardcore cases, the 3 million people who have been on benefit for over a year - most on incapacity benefit - really be steered into skills and work at a time when firms are shedding jobs every day?
Purnell's answer yesterday was that soft-pedalling on the most intractable cases in a recession would only repeat the mistakes of the Tory years when thousands were abandoned without support to languish on incapacity benefit, 2.6 million now compared with 750,000 in 1983. Alistair Darling's PBR put aside £1.3bn to finance carrots and (to impress the tabloids) penal sticks.
David Freud himself recalls that the saintly William Beveridge, whose 1943 report prefigured the modern welfare state, warned that "most men who have once gained the habit of work would rather work ... than be idle" but also that changing habits would be painful. Over the past 60 years successive governments have eased, then tightened pressure on claimants to seek work.
Purnell's vision of a streamlined, pro-active system, prodding all but the most vulnerable towards work, will be fine if theory works in practice. People aren't lazy or evil, says Freud, they need incentives. But his blueprint, embraced by both main parties, also incentivises private firms to take on hard cases, sharing the savings made for the taxpayer whenever long-term claimants get real jobs. Naive or idealistic in tough times?
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