And in the event of a hung parliament…

David Cameron may have to rely on Nick Clegg to form a majority. But Julian Glover says that a deal should be simple – if they focus on areas where they already agree

In late 2007 two fresh-faced, privately educated party leaders gave speeches setting out their philosophies. ‘We’ve always been motivated by a strong and instinctive scepticism about the capacity of bureaucratic systems to deliver progress,’ said one. I want ‘a politics of people, not systems, of communities, not bureaucracies; of individual innovation, not administrative intervention,’ said the other. ‘The days of big government solutions – of “the man in Whitehall knows best” – are now coming to an end,’ they could have chorused together.

The two men were of course David Cameron and Nick Clegg and they would struggle to remember now which of them said what. Like stalagmites and stalactites growing together to form a solid pillar, their language and their ideas have converged. They both describe themselves as liberals; both think Britain’s social democratic experiment has failed; both want to disperse power. Under Cameron, the Tories have grown socially tolerant; under Clegg the Lib Dems have rediscovered their belief in independence from the state.

The stars are aligned, you might think, for a partnership in power. Not quite. Broad ideological overlap is not the same thing as full agreement and both leaders are anyway at the margins of each party’s ideological centre of gravity. Janet Bluerinse, the Eurosceptic Tory constituency chair with firm views on grammar schools, might not think she had much in common with Bob Dogood, a nearby Liberal Democrat councillor who plays in a folk band and teaches at a comprehensive. On election day more than the colour of their rosettes would divide them.