The Green Box

David Cameron intended this week to be a demonstration of politics as it should be, ministers and MPs carrying out the people's business by debating serious issues. The Commons was made to return for a September sitting, to show its usefulness and prepare the ground for the difficult times ahead. The Coalition would display unity of purpose by promoting its constitutional reforms, before heading for the all-important round of party conferences.

A former senior News of the World journalist goes public to corroborate claims that phone-hacking and other illegal reporting techniques were rife at the tabloid while the prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, was deputy editor and then editor of the paper. Paul McMullan, a former features executive and then member of the newspaper's investigations team, says that he personally commissioned private investigators to commit several hundred acts which could be regarded as unlawful, that use of illegal techniques was no secret at the paper, and that senior editors, including Coulson, were aware this was going on. "How can Coulson possibly say he didn't know what was going on with the private investigators?" he asked.

UNIONS have spent an estimated £½MILLION trying to buy the Labour crown for their pet candidate "Red" Ed Miliband. The powerful GMB and Unite unions sent letters urging members to vote for the left-winger. In return, they want Ed to boost their power if he ever gets to No10. The campaign includes £120,000 spent by the GMB posting ballot papers to 610,000 members in an envelope with the message "Vote Ed Miliband". And Unite spent £200,000 on pro-Ed letters to 1.1million members. It also spent £20,000 on texts. Ed's campaign got £28,000 from the GMB in July, and a £105,000 donation from Unite will be confirmed today.

Out in Afghanistan, the British Army is fighting one of its toughest campaigns of modern times. But in Whitehall today, it faces an even more brutal threat: to its survival as a credible fighting force, amid the most draconian government spending cuts ever imposed. Defence Secretary Liam Fox is almost in despair at the enormity of the task he faces, reconciling responsibility for maintaining forces capable of protecting Britain with the intractable demands of next month's Comprehensive Spending Review by the treasury. George Osborne will wield his axe across Whitehall. But for the Armed Forces the numbers are uniquely terrifying. Labour's irresponsibility - spending freely without cash in the safe - means that £37 billion needs to be saved by 2020, just to fill the black hole in the existing defence budget left by Gordon Brown's government.

These looming Labour shadow cabinet elections are going to reintroduce an element of fun into Westminster life. When the party is in opposition, MPs get to vote on who is in the shadow team and it is then for the leader to place the winners in the posts he chooses, if they’ll accept. History suggests this can be as easy as herding cats.

The Prince of Wales gambled the future of his charitable foundation on a speculative property deal that is now draining funds away from other good causes. A senior aide admitted yesterday that the deal had “partially gone wrong”. A £20 million loan taken out in 2007 to help to save Dumfries House in Ayrshire for the nation has left the Prince’s Charities Foundation in the position of a homeowner with negative equity — and the heir to the throne as a victim of the crash in development land prices.

City firms are stepping up their efforts to block moves to break up Britain's high street banks as the appointment of Bob Diamond to take control of Barclays bank propelled banking reform back to the top of the political agenda. The Guardian has learned that industry leaders are furiously lobbying the Treasury and regulators not to break up the banks because of fears it would force them to move overseas.

There is a picture of David Cameron kissing his father. He leans forward with easy affection, hand on shoulder, the gesture relaxed and unembarrassed. It betrays an intimacy that any son must envy. That bond between father and son is a rock on which self-confidence rests, a passport to emotional security, a constant reference point in difficult times. It may explain the calm and measured way in which Mr Cameron has faced up to the traumatic moments in his own life, crowded into two short years — the loss of his son, Ivan, the relentless exposure to publicity, the accession to high office, and then the birth of another child. Whether he will be able to come to terms so easily with the loss of a father who has been, in Mr Cameron’s own words, a role model and a hero, remains to be seen. But I envy him that closeness; it will stand him in good stead.

This is still a phoney war. When the government next month unveils the deepest cuts in public spending since the 1930s, and starts slashing jobs, pensions, benefits and services in the new year, the battle cannot but be in deadly earnest. There is a school of thought among the coalition and its friends that, in the post-Thatcher world, the British workforce is too enfeebled and phlegmatic to resort to the antics of its continental counterparts. The warning from the TUC leader Brendan Barber that the cuts will become this government's poll tax – which 20 years ago led to riots, a mass non-payment campaign and paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's fall from power – is a salutary corrective from a man not given to extravagant rhetoric.

It is my conviction that if you review evidence of the suffering he has inflicted on your fellow Catholics, you will stand in solidarity with them - and join the protesters