Call this saving the children?

(ABDIRASHID ABIKAR/AFP/GettyImages) (Getty Images)

You've got to hand it to the Daily Mail. Charities fund-raising for young people in poverty do not make the easiest of villains. But a piece from Douglas Murray, director of the Henry Jackson Society think tank, struck out at Save the Children nevertheless for making "an obscene political stunt" with their recent campaign to raise £500,000 for the UK's poorest.

Mr Murray complains that the children in the campaign's televised advert are in fact actors – a fiction, he suggests, that renders the whole issue of child poverty in the UK somehow like "a Richard Curtis" film. What little poverty there is in our society, Murray continues, is as nothing compared to that facing Africa's children.

Ergo, Save the Children's decision to return from their primary activities in Africa has the ring of political motivation – timed to pile further pressure on the coalition to rein in their necessary reforms of the welfare sector.