The three UK party conferences have now passed and the parties laid out their stalls. The countdown to the election has begun with only seven months to the start of the formal campaign next spring.
Cameron, Brown and Clegg all stressed their character, vision and engaged in the sort of political cross-dressing that has become the fashion following on from Tony Blair.
What was more revealing than what they said was what they didn't say. We know Gordon Brown can't say ‘sorry', but Tony Blair never apologised for Iraq and sort of got away with it. David Cameron could not find it in himself to mention once ‘bankers', ‘markets' or the phrase ‘market failure'.
All three party leaders said little of substance on the domestic crisis which erupted a few months ago, namely the crisis of our political system begun by the expenses scandal. This should be natural territory for the reforming Lib Dems, but Clegg isn't bursting with rage. Brown commented in passing, while Cameron devoted the most words, but neither dwelt on it, or saw the all-encompassing nature of it.
Brown declared that ‘politics need morals' and made a series of proposals such as allowing voters to recall MPs and a referendum on the Alternative Vote, which may have begun a serious debate if he had made them when he first became Prime Minister, but look opportunist ‘window dressing' now.
Cameron talked in a more rhetorical style of the age of ‘political disillusionment' and his remedies, cutting MPs pay, pensions and their numbers, a clarion call even more threadbare than Brown's, but with populist sensibility.