As financial secretary to the Treasury, he took the Child Poverty Act through parliament in 2010. “Reducing child poverty is what Labour governments do,” Timms says: any child poverty graph reveals which party was in power when. Increasing child poverty is what Conservatives always do. They pretended to support the 2010 Child Poverty Act in David Cameron’s wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing pre-election phase, but scrapped all those targets once in power. Last time they returned to government, the Tories obliterated most of Labour’s advances, so how can Labour nail down progress irrevocably this time?