Hunt "behaved impartially" despite memo

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt was defended today by the Prime Minister after an explosive memo was revealed to the Leveson inquiry.

The memo relates to the purchase of biscuits for Cabinet meetings, a task previously in the hands of Vince Cable, the business secretary, but he was stripped of the role after being caught by a newspaper sting. Mr Cable was caught on tape saying how much he hated custard creams. This clear bias against the custard cream meant he could no longer order biscuits impartially. The responsibility was then handed to Hunt who then proceeded to order custard creams by the hundredweight.

The controversial memo revealed that Hunt had expressed, through his advisers, to the Custard Cream International that he favoured their product and would see to it that everything would be done to ensure their product would be the biscuit of choice.

Eschewing the really hard interviews, the Prime Minister chose to go on ITV's hard-hitting news - definitely news and not celebrity froth peddling - show Daybreak to support his colleague. "Jeremy [Hunt] acted completely impartially when selecting the biscuits. He may have said in this memo that he preferred the custard cream, instructed his aides to ease the path with the manufacturers, negotiate concessions which would avoid the need for competition queries, but after I gave him the job of selecting the biscuits, he put all of that to one side and acted completely impartially.

"I had to take Vince Cable off the job because of his unguarded and unwise comments, but Jeremy Hunt's comments were irrelevant because after he made them, he acted totally differently", he continued before adding "besides, nobody at Custard Creams International seems to remember anything about any of this, so happy days".

LOL not the only acronym Cameron has issues with

In testimony to the Leveson inquiry, former Sun and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks told how the Prime Minister would sign off text messages to her with "LOL", under the impression it meant 'lots of love'. Of being told it's actual meaning - 'laugh out loud' - Mr Cameron stopped using it.

This  isn't the first or only acronym and/or initialisation that the Prime Minister has got wrong. Other common internet and text-speak abbreviations include WTF - 'what the fuck?', as expression of surprise and alarm - which Cameron thought meant 'World Trade Fair' and had instructed civil servants to get down to King's Cross after seeing a message on Twitter saying "WTF is going on at King's Cross?" It turned out to be a minor traffic incident leading to some queuing. A couple of diplomatic incidents were narrowly averted when Cameron sent messages ending 'PMSL' - 'piss myself laughing' - to world leaders dealing with national disasters. Prime Minister of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari had to be calmed by aides for hours after receiving a message from his British counterpart after the devastating floods. The message is thought to have read "terrible news about the flooding, PMSL", with Cameron under the impression he had signed off 'Prime Minister sends love".

But it isn't just those commonly used in electronic communications; he also has trouble with governmental acronyms and abbreviations. PSBR - public sector borrowing requirement - has been translated in the head of the country's leader as 'please slash budgets recklessly', while NHS appears to have been interpreted as 'national horse sale'. "On arriving at Number 10", a former aide to the PM told us, "he was adamant that government had no business in the NHS as buying and selling horses was not a key function for the state and instructed us to sell it off forthwith. When we finally explained what the NHS was, we had a jolly good laugh before he told us to go and sell that off forthwith anyway".

Cameron: Tobin tax will "cost British jobs"

UK Prime Minister David Cameron used his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos today to argue against a tax on financial transactions - the so-called Tobin Tax or, for particularly stupid British tabloids, a Robin Hood Tax - saying that it is not the responsibility of the EU to do something that potentially would lead to jobs in Britain being lost.

"This is a reckless act that would lead to Brussels making British people out of work", said Cameron, smugly, "when it is clearly the job of the Conservative Party to make that number of people unemployed. British dole queues for British people!".

"Moreover", continued the man voted as most resembling a slab of reconstituted ham, "we must retain the sovereign right to decide who we put out of work and our friends did not vote for us in order that we hit their bottom line. We were voted in with a semi-sort-of-mandate to put teachers, nurses, bin men and police officers out of work, not those who work in the world of high finance that don't actually produce anything, but earn loads by pushing imaginary currency from here to there. Oh dear me no".

David Cameron is still, somehow, the UK Prime Minister.