The Cameron/Clegg press conference did not teach us very much — save that the chemistry between the two is as good as ever, that they can still finish each other’s sentences and exchange bad jokes. The Prime Minister’s bad joke related to one of the comments under his interview with Matthew d’Ancona yesterday where he (in effect) said he wanted to stay in No10 until 2020.
When asked about this today, the PM replied that a commentator on the Telegraph Online complained: ‘It’s already 20:51 and you’re still here.’ The assembled journalists treated his joke with the same respectful silence that they did to Clegg’s ‘unvarnished truth’ joke. ‘You’re all very slow today,’ Cameron chided. Part of the silence, I suspect, was surprise that the PM reads the comments under the piece — something journalists don’t always do. I was on Richard Bacon’s Five Live show where he expressed amazement: a PM that spends his time reading comments on blogs? “That way madness lies,” he said.
But Cameron is a faithful reader of blogs: he once told me that he reads Coffee House every day.
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