There was only one story that the Fawkes household cared about yesterday. Peppa Pig’s boycott of Yvette Cooper’s photo-op.  Can you blame Peppa? Yvette was in that auto-pilot soundbite mode thing she does, droning on that “the Conservative and Liberal Democrats would form a ‘Coalition of Cuts for Children’ that would put children in the frontline for spending cuts”. Yesterday the top-line from Labour was “only we can save your children”, it was so over the top it was unbelievable.

All obscured anyway by Peppa’s boycott of Yvette’s photo-op at a nursery. Labour’s press conference yesterday morning will be used in the future by media studies classes as a textbook case study on how not to handle the media.  Mandelson and Ed Ball’s exchanges with Adam Boulton, Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson were pretty bad tempered. The hacks were all trying to identify where Labour’s expected £30 billion of cuts were coming from, the issue which dominates front pages this morning following on from the IFS report accusing all parties of electoral dishonesty.

The backfiring Peppa photo-op is a metaphor for the Labour campaign, they can’t get traction on their new “Coalition for Cuts” dividing line because they themselves won’t credibly specify their own closet cuts agenda.  Peppa the Pig stood in for government spokesman on the Daily Politics and featured on Newsnight more than Yvette’s message. Peppa might be a fictional children’s character, but she is more credible than Yvette.