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.