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Talking of the Comprehensive Spending Review, I was chatting to a Cabinet minister recently who was explaining how no minister wanted to be first to announce they had reached a deal with the Treasury.

Anyone who did so might risk being thought of as a soft-touch. The minister thought it more likely that several deals would be announced at once, with ministers falling over all at once, rather like a row of penguins.

And what about the so-called Star Chamber, the Cabinet's Public Expenditure sub-committee, which will adjudicate on cases where departmental ministers can't agree cuts with the Treasury?

The committee currently consists of ministers who either have small budgets or none at all, though departmental ministers will be added to the membership in due course once they have settled with the Treasury.

My ministerial contact told me that in the end nobody will bother appealing to the Star Chamber. It would be a waste of time, he said, since, like the medieval Star Chamber they would simply be "assumed to be guilty".

He suggested fellow departmental ministers on the committee won't want to allow any appeals against the Treasury through fear it would mean extra cuts in their own departments.