Sketch: Labour run out of room on welfare According to the invitation, Liam Byrne was to speak at a place in Finsbury Park called the London Fashion Centre. This may sound an unlikely venue for a speech on Universal Credit by the Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary - short, forties, shiny-headed, nicknamed Baldemort - but then we got there and found he was actually giving it in an office up two flights of stairs. When I say office, I don't mean some vast, modern, open-plan expanse; I mean office as in "deputy headmaster's office." For a speech by a former Cabinet minister, it was a remarkably small venue. Perhaps all the local phone boxes had already been booked up. We waited. Apparently the room belonged to a children's mentoring charity. In the corner was a shelving unit stacked with Monopoly, Pictionary, Scrabble and other board games. "At least those'll give us something to do once the speech starts," said a journalist. Although what with the shortage of space the board would probably have to sit out in the corridor. Twenty minutes late, Mr Byrne squeezed through his audience to the front. "I hope you're comfortable," he said, brightly. I'll rattle through this. His subject was welfare, or, as Labour prefer to call it, social security. Senior party figures are worried that, in the public's mind, the word "welfare" has become too closely linked with idleness, fecklessness, scrounging, and, worst of all, Labour. Hence during his speech Mr Byrne said "social security" 12 times, and "welfare" only once ("This Government's promised welfare revolution has collapsed"). Lately there have been rumours that Mr Byrne won't survive Ed Miliband's forthcoming reshuffle. This gave his criticisms of Iain Duncan Smith, his opposite number, a presumably unintended air of pathos. Rumours began to swirl around Whitehall that senior ministers were not happy with his performance... Colleagues started to wonder out loud whether his big projects were headed for disaster... Failure... Cannot go on like this... The time has come for some proper performance management... Afterwards he took questions from the press. "We've got 10 minutes for questions - or less if they get difficult!" A journalist asked what he'd meant when he said, "Something seems to be very wrong in [Mr Duncan Smith's] mind." Was this really an ideal way to propose cross-party talks? "I don't have any doubts about Mr Duncan Smith's sanity," replied Mr Byrne, without explaining what "something very wrong in his mind" could mean other than "he's bonkers." He tried a different line of attack. "The Conservative party," he said, "has become the "Failure to Reform Welfare" party." Nice try, but two points off for saying welfare. Out in the street he did some interviews for TV. Was this, asked a reporter, your last chance to save your job before the reshuffle? "Ha, ha, ha!" said Mr Byrne, as jovially as he could. On the windows of the London Fashion Centre were signs saying "Huge clearance!" and "Everything must go!," but thankfully none of them were in shot.