David Cameron did particularly well in the Cameron and Clegg joint interview just now. He has a real ability to read the mood of an audience; the debates could have been very different if the audience hadn’t been required to be silent.
The only news made during the interview was Cameron saying that he will not take the Prime Minister’s pension. But there was an interesting bit at the very end when Nick Robinson asked Nick Clegg what he had kept out of the Budget. Clegg said he didn’t want to go into the ‘gory details’, a phrase that Robinson immediately jumped on. Cameron then intervened to say that the one thousand pound increase in the personal allowance was a Lib Dem policy. But the question of what the Liberal Democrats had kept out of the Budget went unanswered.
The event was dominated by public sector workers voicing their concerns; it was a reminder that the Budget really was the beginning of the public sector recession. But, as I argue in the magazine tomorrow, there’s a thought-through Tory strategy to expand the private sector as the public sector shrinks.
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