David Davies' outburst today against Gordon Brown is a smokescreen to hide the Tories hurried scrabble to get out of the Derek Conway row.

Look at this: last week Cameron announced his FRONT BENCH would have until April to declare if they employed family members - ie: were guilty of the same misappropriation of taxpayers money as Derek Conway. That gave them two months to stop doing it and put their houses in order.

Today he changed his mind and said they would have until JULY to do it. Remember this is front benchers not back benchers, he isn't asking them to declare anything at all.

It looks to me like one of the Tory Front Bench is being protected from having to delcare something embarrassing - let's see if we can find out who it is.

David Cameron has just announced that he's withdrawing the Conservative Whip from Derek Conway, hours after enduring a massive onslaught of criticism from the general public and his own grassroots and only hours after his initial reaction on the matter included support for Derek Conway.

David Davis is said to have been furious after Cameron's U-turn. Could this have been the end of Dave, or would it have been dealt swiftly by Lord Ashcroft? Cameron's latest statement came just hours after we learned that Conway's eldest son was also possibly siphoning taxpayers funds to subsidise his higher education costs. The internal dynamics of team Cameron have also been fractured, as there had been talk of various grassroots organisations preparing to overtly lobby Cameron on the issue.