Portrait of the week | 3 April 2010

Mr Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor, and Mr Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, held a debate on television. Many viewers had hoped one of them would fall off the tightrope, but none did. Mr Cable called Labour efficiency-saving plans a ‘fiction’ and accused the Tories of swallowing the fiction to fund their proposed cut, announced earlier that day, for low and middle earners, of the 1 per cent rise in National Insurance due in 2011.