Hold the front page! - the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, is today calling on Gordon Brown to keep one of his tax initiative wheezes, rather than scrap it.
In last week's budget - not in the statement read out by the chancellor, but in the small print of the little Red (or read) Book - Mr Brown announced the government would be scrapping something called the "home computing initiative".
This is a scheme whereby predominantly low-paid staff can buy home computers in installments out of their gross pay through their employers, and has already helped half a million families, most of them low-income, hook up to the digital information superhighway world wide web. Or whatever it's called this week.
In a reversal of the usual cut-and-thrust of Labour/Tory exchanges, Mr Osborne today launched an online petition to save the scheme.
He told Guardian Unlimited: "Unlike most of Mr Brown's complicated and unworkable tax initiatives, this was actually a great success.
"It got a lot of low income people online, which is what Britain will need to be a skilled knowledge economy over the coming 10 to 20 years.
"Now the chancellor has abolished it with no consultation and no fanfare - he did not even mention it in his budget statement."
The Treasury says the scheme has been abused by people using the cash to buy computer games and the like, but in this age of post-Punch & Judy politics, Mr Osborne - who in the past has said Mr Brown has been "nothing other than unpleasant to me" - is offering to work together to come up with a solution.
"In the last two days I have spoken to the CBI, the TUC and a number of employers. All agree that the chancellor is making a huge mistake.
"The Conservative party is offering to work with the government to devise new rules which will help prevent any abuses while preserving the benefits of this important Initiative. With cross-party support we can include the changes in this month's finance bill.
"It is not too late for this analogue chancellor to change his mind."
Public U-turns and acknowledgement he might have got things wrong are not the chancellor's most characteristic trait, however, so don't hold your breath.
