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I’ve just pitched a Saturday night prole-pleaser to the BBC. It’s downmarket from Strictly Come Dancing I suppose but it’s definitely on a level with that one where minor celebrities get pushed into a swimming pool. It’s called Feel the Benefit and it goes like this.

Each week a recipient of state benefits is chosen at random and invited to appear on Feel the Benefit in front of a studio audience. While Dale Winton pretends to be interested in the contestant’s particulars, behind them in full sight of the audience, Works and Pensions Secretary James Purnell and his Tory shadow Chris Grayling loosen their ties, roll up their sleeves and start limbering up.

The contestant is then tied up in a sack and Purnell and Grayling see who can beat the living daylights of them with a cricket bat in the most crowd-pleasing fashion. The audience’s reaction is fed into a YouGov computer and the one to administer the best thrashing gets an instant five per cent boost in the opinion polls. At the end of the show Dale winks the camera and says, ‘Don’t forget, next time it could be you!’

I think it’d sell.

I was inspired after reading of Purnell and Grayling trying to outdo each other at the weekend over who hates the disadvantaged most.

An astonishing 140,000 households are pocketing more in benefits than the average take-home wage.

Let’s get one thing straight. There’s no question of fraud of theft here. These people are entitled to these benefits, it’s just that, to listen to the Tories, they shouldn’t be entitled to them. The suggestion is that they should somehow get by on less. ‘So many households getting such great sums of money from a welfare state creates a shameful situation where people can live a life on benefits,’ said Grayling, no doubt in grasp of the facts of individual cases and not going off half-cocked over headline figures.

Still, James Purnell wasn’t going to take being outflanked on the right on this issue and came right back at Grayling as a one man good cop bad cop routine. ‘The Tories are happy for drug addicts to get benefits with no questions asked, but now seem to be saying they don’t think families struggling to cope with a disability should get real help,’ he said. How about that? The Tories are soft on drug addicts but hate the disabled.

‘James Purnell accused Mr Grayling of “posturing” by attacking families caring for disabled relatives while failing to back tough measures on welfare reform,’ according to the Daily Mail. You see, the Tories’ problem is that they just don’t hate the poor as much as New Labour. The arms race is on.

And the propaganda is in. The virus has spread and the media have got it good. Take a look at this:

Some 140,000 families are raking in more in benefits than the average take-home salary, it has been revealed.

Raking in? I say it again, these people are entitled to this money under the rules. So who used such emotive language? The Daily Mail? The Sun? No, it was the Press Association, a supposedly prestigious news organisation and the go-to guys for vanilla copy for financially stretched newspapers. When the likes of ‘fast, fair and accurate’ PA are starting to mix news with editorial, you know that Purnell and Grayling have won the battle of ideas*.

Yet just after Christmas, a Department of Works and Pensions report emerged saying that ‘single mothers who return to work face stress, depression and financial insecurity‘. I’m sure you’ll be shocked and amazed to hear it.

What I want to know is whether James Purnell had read that report before he went flexing his muscles in the Sunday Times under the headline ‘Welfare mothers to be forced to work‘. (I suspect he’s was too busy supervising his department squittering £24 million on doing up the office.)

We’ll see in the next few months if such worrying findings soften Purnell’s approach. No doubt Grayling will be watching from the shadows with his cricket bat, hoping for Purnell to drop his guard. Some hope. They’ll be graduating from cricket bats to something bigger and heavier soon enough.

* Thanks to Justin for the link.