David Cameron and George Osborne have taken a lot of flak for their promise to protect the NHS from spending cuts by ring-fencing its budget. The Tory right said it was a mistake, their coalition partners insisted pre-election that it was unwise and even Labour's Andy Burnham said he wouldn't do it (preferring to transfer some money into social care instead).

Like so many rows about spending this one may turn out to be rather artificial as evidence mounts that cuts in the NHS are coming and are needed merely to cope with going from huge spending increases to budgets that are flat in real terms.

Yesterday Gloria de Perio - a former colleague and now the new MP for Ashfield - quoted a a letter from Nottinghamshire County PCT to Kingsmill hospital in her constituency warning of cuts of over 8% next year in the budget for care. I'm told by those who know about the NHS that these sort of letters are the beginning of negotiations and not the final figure but it's evidence that even though the coalition will insist the NHS budget is not being cut it may not feel that way up and down the country.

The NHS has been told by its chief executive, Sir David Nicholson, that it needs to find between £15bn and £20bn of savings in the next couple of years.

A recent report from the Royal College of Nursing has identified at least 10,000 jobs under threat in just 100 NHS trusts.

PS.I've been travelling down the A1 sampling public opinion on public spending cuts. Tonight I report on the TV News at 6 and 10 from Letchworth, where I've asked people whether they would prefer bigger welfare cuts to allow less to be cut from public services.

Cutting short MPs' holidays no doubt seemed like a good, populist idea a few weeks ago. It probably doesn't look that way now. The coalition has given its opponents a platform in the weeks running up to the party conferences.

The government's position is that the police and a select committee have looked into the hacking allegations and found no evidence that Coulson knew it was happening when he was editor of the News of the World.

The opposition states that the police haven't looked hard enough and it's time they looked harder - ideally, until they find something that forces the prime minister's close ally out.

That is why Andy Coulson's future now depends to a large extent on what the police now do. If they conclude that there is little new - in terms of evidence rather than journalism - in what the New York Times reported then Coulson can breathe a sigh of relief. If, on the other hand, they do find new evidence, re-open their inquiry and take Coulson up on his offer to be interviewed, life could get very uncomfortable for him.

Yates of the Yard has long and painful experience of being dragged into a lengthy and costly inquiry which pitted the Met against the government of the day. My hunch is that he's unlikely to relish the prospect of having to do so again.

Even if I'm right, David Cameron will now face questions on this at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. If he'd left the Commons holidays as they were he could have avoided them for weeks.

A new BBC poll demonstrates why politicians love to promise to cut waste and inefficiency but fear promises to cut anything else.

The poll confirms that there is a clear majority in favour of "taking steps to reduce the government's budget deficit and debt". 60% back that proposition.

Below is a piece I wrote about public attitudes to cuts for the Mail on Sunday.

----

It's the debate the country never had. The one we should have had at the election. It will soon be time to make the choices that could have been made before polling day but which our political leaders feared to discuss openly.

It's now clearer than ever that the party leaders went through weeks of campaigning and a historic series of televised debates without spelling out the "tough choices" they're so fond of talking about. Instead they chose a narrow strip of territory to fight the same battle again and again.

Think back and you may just recall those days in March, April and May when we were told that what really, really mattered was whether £6bn in wasteful spending could be cut this year in order to avoid a tax rise. Given the scale of the decisions ministers now have to make it was the equivalent of having a punch-up about a fiver dropped on the floor while your house is burning down.

I recall Gordon Brown's white anger when I asked him repeatedly in an interview whether he was being straight with the public about the need to cut spending. Interviewers, I was told through thinly stretched lips should never question the prime minister's honesty. For months the "C" word wouldn't pass Brown's lips at all. We now know - thanks to Peter Mandelson's memoirs - the fury he felt when cajoled by Mandelson, Alistair Darling and others into letting that word - "cuts" - pass his lips. "Well, are you satisfied all of you?" he's said to have demanded. "We should not be in this place! Don't give me all this about spending cuts!"

Brown felt that to concede the case for cuts would give the voters a choice between "nice cuts" from Labour and "nasty cuts" from the Tories - a choice he felt would "kill us" .

David Cameron soon dropped talk of an "age of austerity" and spelling out painful choices when he saw that it was killing his poll lead. He used to brush away my requests for more candour by simply pointing out that he'd gone a damn sight further than the prime minister who, after all, had all the figures.

Nick Clegg who'd once warned of the need for "savage cuts" chose during the election to emphasise that he sided with Labour in warning of the risks of cuts now. In a post-election interview with me he admitted that he'd changed his mind about this before polling day but hadn't got round to telling voters about it until afterwards.

This lack of candour all-round has a legacy. By the time of the election the country - or at least the vast majority of it - had come to accept that the government had been spending too much, borrowing too much and had to start cutting. However, huge questions were, and remain, unanswered for most voters - how much should be cut, when should it start, how fast it should be done and, crucially, which programmes should face the axe?

George Osborne has voluntarily put himself into an economic strait-jacket - announcing targets for cuts and giving away his capacity to massage the Treasury's economic forecasts if he doesn't meet them. Between now and the announcement of his spending review on 20 October ministers are meeting behind closed doors to carve up a national cake that just got a whole lot smaller. Historians will note with interest the government's choice of the term "Star Chamber" for these meetings - inviting a comparison with the secret courts which once handed out summary justice on behalf of unaccountable kings. What is decided there will shape not just the immediate economic and political future of this country but people's lives for years to come.

Over the past few days I've been trying to engage voters up and down the country in the debate for a series of reports which will run on BBC News this week. I've been driving down the A1 - Britain's somewhat unglamorous answer to Route 66. I've been getting my kicks from Gateshead to Grantham and onto Letchworth. It's not quite, I must confess, as exciting as Amarillo and New Mexico but I've been fascinated by what I've heard.

What I didn't hear once is anyone argue that there was no need to cut or no cause to worry about the deficit. What I did hear again and again is deep anxiety about where cuts might fall and the impact they might have.

Going for a run - or in my case a wheezy jog - with Gateshead's Low Fell Running Club I heard a largely middle class crowd worry that cuts made too deep and too fast could damage the North East. Memories of the 1980s recession are still raw here. Dependence on the public sector still strong - almost one in three jobs is paid for by public money.

At an engineering firm in Grantham I heard workers worry that cuts might destroy consumer confidence bringing back the days not long gone when the talk was of firings not hirings. At a hairdressers down the road customers expressed their fears that the government might cut the wrong things. Some simply did not believe ministers' promises to protect health spending.

I asked buyers and sellers at a car boot sale in Letchworth whether they'd rather welfare be cut than public services. Most agreed they would but once I suggested that perhaps they might like to give up their tax credits or their free bus pass they became rather less keen.

The opinion polling confirms the story. The argument about whether to cut is over. Around three-quarters of voters tell pollsters that spending cuts are necessary to cut Britain's debt. The other arguments have, however, scarcely begun. If you ask people whether they fear that the planned cuts may be too deep the numbers start to change.

One recent poll showed around two-fifths of people share that worry. Another showed that figure rising to well over half once people were told that the government planned cuts of a quarter in the budgets of most government departments. More than half of people tell pollsters they fear a second recession. These anxieties grow louder the further north you are, when you speak to women not men, and to those who work in the public rather than the private sector.

Those barely suppressed doubts and fears are the reason the politicians were so cautious at election time. However, in the past few days the debate has begun to open up again. Gordon Brown's old ally Ed Balls has warned that even the policy his party advocated at the election risked driving the economy back into recession.

Thus, there are now not two but three political positions on how soon and how far to cut spending - the government's, the previous government's and those who warn that that consensus is as wrong as those which led Britain to adopt the Gold Standard or join the Euro.

The argument is where Gordon Brown wanted it to be - not between nice and nasty cuts but between "deficit deniers" and "growth deniers". Privately, I've heard even Tory cabinet ministers wonder how wise it is to cut as far and as fast as they are committed to doing.

This is the debate the BBC is now trying to engage viewers, listeners and readers with. That's why they're staging 12 major regional television debates across England, sending me driving down the A1 and will air other reports and features. Bizarrely some newspapers and some politicians suggest that this is doing the government's work for them. Some ministers fear exactly the reverse. Naturally, politicians on all sides are nervous about a debate they didn't dare to have openly at the election.

Deep down, however, they know that this debate is long, long overdue.

At last a substantial issue has surfaced in the Labour leadership race. It's the deficit and how quickly Labour should pledge to cut spending to tackle it.

Ed Balls has come out fighting against not just the coalition's policy but the one which his own party fought the last election on. Cutting the deficit in half in four years is too ambitious he says. He urges his party to challenge the consensus and to answer critics who attack "deficit deniers" as "growth deniers".

Alistair Darling's policy is still backed by David Miliband. Brother Ed meantime describes it cryptically as a "starting point"- hinting, although not spelling out, that he would, like the other Ed, re-write it.

Meantime, Tony Blair warns about the dangers of not tackling the deficit in language David Cameron must wish he could match.

Old opposition hands advise that it is never wise to spell out what you'd do in government years before an election. Messrs Balls and Blair have now made it hard to avoid. They have, though, created another problem.

If David Miliband wins the leadership contest it would be nigh on impossible to make Ed Balls shadow chancellor since they have publicly disagreed on the most important aspect of economic policy.

PS. After my apology earlier in the week I have a confession. I am involved in what some see as a BBC conspiracy to examine the most important issue of the day. I am travelling down the A1 making a series of films on public attitudes to spending cuts and how to deal with the deficit. They'll be broadcast next week.

This, says William Hague, is "the straightforward truth", in one of the most extraordinary statements I have ever read from a senior politician.

The foreign secretary admits sharing twin hotel rooms with the man he later appointed - at taxpayers' expense - as his special adviser.

Today Christopher Myers resigned his position.

Hague insists that "Any suggestion that his appointment was due to an improper relationship between us is utterly false" before going much further denying that "I have ever been involved in a relationship with any man".

William Hague addresses delegates at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, 2009

It goes on to reveal a sad, and up till now private, story about his marriage.

Ffion, it says, has "suffered multiple miscarriages" and the couple "are still grieving for the loss of a pregnancy this summer".

Hague knows that this is an open invitation to prurient media organisations to challenge the truth of his statement.

It is also an invitation for public sympathy. It is a story that, in tomorrow morning's papers, will rival the tales told by Tony Blair.

There's an old saying: don't look in the crystal ball, read the book.

The re-opening of old political wounds will be enough to make some refuse to listen to what their former leader says.

Many may bridle at his refusal to apologise for Iraq, to condemn David Cameron's planned cuts or to accept that the banking crisis has made the case for more government and more regulated markets.

There will, though, be some who do listen to the Labour Party's greatest communicator and unrivalled election winner.

His message to them was clear. Don't do what our party has always done and allow one election defeat to be followed by others. Abandon the New Labour path at your peril. In other words - though he never says so explicitly in his book or his interviews - vote for David Miliband to be our next leader.

PS. I will turn my attention to William Hague's extraordinary statement a little later.

I would like to apologise for my reporting of the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the years they were together in government. Some said it was tittle tattle, others that it was speculation, a few dared to suggest that it was fabrication.

I now accept that I made mistakes. Things were worse - much worse - than I reflected at the time.

I did not report then but now can that:

• Tony Blair blamed Gordon Brown for starting the cash for honours row which led to the first ever police investigation into a serving prime minister

• Gordon Brown threatened to trigger that row if he didn't get his way on a policy which affects the pensions of millions of voters

• Mr Blair did renege on a deal to stand down before the 2005 election

• He did not sack Gordon Brown because he believed that "let loose" he might lead a left wing rebellion

• The PM turned to drink to deal with the stress of dealing with someone he regarded as "very very difficult" and "maddening"

• Tony Blair knew that Gordon Brown would be a hopeless prime minister

Tony Blair's memoirs remind me of Princess Diana's extraordinary Panorama interview. They confirm that what was reported about what happened behind the scenes was just the half of it.

Over breakfast tomorrow morning a few people will open envelopes containing a ballot paper allowing them a say in who becomes Labour's next leader and potentially our next prime minister.

Many will, instead, open their newspaper and listen to the radio to learn the views of the last person to win an election for the party.

All the candidates insist that they want to move on from the past but the publication of Tony Blair's memoirs and his verdict on Labour's 13 years in power and the election his successor lost will make that impossible.

Besides, it is now many weeks since this contest began and it has been dominated not by a policy debate but by a mixture of personality and subtle positioning in relationship to the past.

There is one issue - a crucial one - which does divide the candidates - it is how fast to curb public spending in order to bring down the deficit.

All agree the coalition is moving too far too fast but Ed Balls says that even the last government's plans were too drastic.

With this contest reaching the point of decision and with the past being re-lived there will, of course, be more tension ahead.

However, students of history will note that this is a long, long way away from the bitter and divisive contest which elected Michael Foot and split Labour 30 years ago.

Whoever wins wants to have a chance to write their own prime ministerial memoirs.

The thing about working in news is that you almost never have the time or, frankly, the inclination to review what you said and judge whether it has stood the test of time.

For the past few weeks, however, I've done just that - re-living the five days that led to the creation of Britain's first coalition government in 65 years.

Happily I have not come across any gross inaccuracies but am struck by my failure - shared by many - to join the dots. In particular, I wish I'd listened more to two Liberal Democrats who told me during the election that they could see David Cameron doing a post-election deal.

Neil Sherlock, an adviser to this and many previous Lib Dem leaders, rang to remind me of what the Tory leader had said in a Radio 4 documentary I had made about Disraeli. Cameron had praised Dizzy for outmanoeuvring Gladstone on the issue of political reform and quoted a historian who said that the former Tory PM had "taken a leap in the dark and then leapt again". Neil's view was that anyone who could appreciate Disraeli's bold risk-taking was capable of replicating it.

Chris Huhne told me and his party that Cameron was the only Napoleonic leader left in Europe. In other words, whatever the Tory leader said became Tory policy.

Both were proved right.

There were a lot of reasons why Cameron was in the driving seat after polling day - his party had the most votes and seats; the Lib Dems had promised to respect this "mandate" in negotiations (they didn't have to, since in other parts of the world it's not uncommon for the second and third parties to form a government); Labour had had 13 years in office and three terms; and, of course, Gordon Brown was unpopular.

However, the personalities of the two leaders were vital to what happened in those five days. David Cameron told me for a programme on the making of the coalition, which is broadcast tonight, that he woke up on Friday morning after a few hours of sleep and decided that a coalition was right for Britain. The truth is, I believe, a little more complex. Cameron sensed that he was unlikely to secure a majority, feared the consequences for him and his modernising project of failing and had talked with his closest allies about a coalition well before polling day.

In stark contrast, Gordon Brown had not prepared a policy offer for the Lib Dems, nor got the backing of his Cabinet, nor developed a relationship with Nick Clegg. This, despite the fact that he must have known that a Lib/Lab deal was likely to be his best hope of political survival. As so often with Brown this was not a failure to see ahead. He had, after all, proposed radical political reform, but he'd done it so late in his time in Downing Street that it wasn't taken seriously.

Instead of building a relationship with the man with whom he might have to share power, Gordon Brown relied instead on his contacts with former Lib Dem leaders - Charles Kennedy, Paddy Ashdown and Menzies Campbell - and Vince Cable. Cable, who has known and liked Brown for three decades, was a regular pre-election visitor to Number 10. There were even hints of a ministerial job for him. Brown ignored the advice of Cable and all his Lib Dem friends to find a way to get on with Clegg. When I put it to Peter Mandelson that Clegg found Brown impossible, the Prince of Darkness replied with a wry grin that "No... he'd found him Gordon-ish".

There was another factor beyond the personal - the economic context on that post-election weekend. The crisis talks over how to prevent the Greek debt crisis spreading contagion throughout the eurozone were little reported in Britain, but officials in the Treasury and the Bank of England were focused on little else. Their fear was what one official describes as a "perfect storm" if the EU failed to agree a bail-out plan and Britain failed to produce a stable government by the time the markets opened on the Monday morning after the election.

When negotiators from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats came to the Cabinet Office for their first meeting, the Cabinet Secretary left them in no doubt what was expected of them. "My advice to them," Sir Gus O'Donnell tells the programme, "[was] that pace was important but that also the more comprehensive the agreement the better." If things had gone wrong, he says, "the markets would really have made us pay a price on the Monday morning by selling our debt and that would have been a real problem for the country."

Labour figures insist that all the arguments used by the Lib Dems - the Parliamentary arithmetic, the market warnings, the prime minister being "Gordon-ish" - are mere alibis to cover the fact that they made a choice to get into bed with the Conservative rather than Labour.

What is striking reviewing those five days is how each of those reasons or alibis - take your pick - could be seen in advance. It was always likely that the Tories would be the largest party after the election. It was always evident that the Lib Dems were more hawkish on the deficit than Labour: Nick Clegg was the first to talk of "savage cuts"; Vince Cable was the first to spell out how they might be made; Chris Huhne used to work for a credit rating agency; David Laws is a former merchant banker. And it always evident that Nick Clegg found Gordon Brown impossible to deal with.

If only I'd listened to more to those two Lib Dems, I would also have predicted David Cameron's boldness - Labour's Andrew Adonis calls it his "strategic brilliance" - and the Tory leader's capacity to get pretty much anything past his party.

Note to self: Must try harder...

Update, 10:54, 29 July: Those who think I've been too hard on Gordon Brown will be interested in Anthony Seldon's account in today's Independent of how he played those five days in May.

He reports what Brown would have said if he'd agreed to be interviewed for tonight's documentary - namely that he was always willing to stand aside to enable a coalition with the Lib Dems after a referendum on full scale political reform - PR and an elected Lords - had been held; that he signalled a willingness to talk about his future in his first phone call with Clegg and that he was explicit about it in their first meeting.

I've no doubt that Brown was sincere in his efforts to build a coalition and that he was not helped by colleagues who thought Labour should accept defeat - ranging from Alistair Darling to Tony Blair.

The problem was that it was too late. The Lib Dems were deeply suspicious of Brown - blaming him for resisting a deal between Blair and Ashdown in the 90s, for trying to recruit Paddy Ashdown to the Cabinet in 2007 without offering the Lib Dems anything in return and for only backing AV in the dying weeks of 13 years of New Labour rule. His relationship with Clegg was poor. The Labour Party had moved on.

Once again Brown saw what needed to be done but simply could not do it.

Five Days that Changed Britain is on BBC Two tonight at 2100 BST.

By abandoning plans to give anonymity to men accused of rape the government has dropped the first policy contained in the coalition agreement.

It is easy to forget quite how quickly that document was drawn up. Version One was produced in less than five days immediately after the election when the Tory and Lib Dem negotiators had had very little sleep.

Since giving anonymity was not in either party manifesto many have puzzled where this controversial idea came from. It stemmed from an old Lib Dem conference motion which Oliver Letwin is blamed/credited for noticing.

The Tories have been keen to downplay how prepared they were for hung Parliament negotiations. However, on the day after the polls closed, Letwin appeared to know more about Lib Dem policy than any of Nick Clegg's negotiators. The Tories arrived at talks with a string of policy concessions to woo their potential coalition partners.

You will, of course, learn more about this - yes, you saw the shameless plug coming - in my documentary Five Days that Changed Britain which you can see this Thursday on BBC2 at 21:00.

The Treasury has yet to receive a single submission from any government department about how they propose to cut their budgets. The deadline is tomorrow.

Every department is expected to have come up with their initial ideas of how to cut their budget by 25% and, just to make life more interesting, 40% too.

One minister tells me that "It's been horrible but it's what we were elected to do". Another joked - rather macabrely - that they'd lined up a little girl grasping a teddy bear to front up their campaign to avoid the axe.

The Treasury warn that this is the time when departments parade "bleeding stumps" - leaking stories about which worthy individual, cause or community will suffer if they are made to deliver painful cuts.

The word at the Department for Energy and Climate is that they have "radioactive bleeding stumps" - a reference to the huge cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations which is a large part of their budget.

Next week the PEX Committee - that's Whitehall's name for the new Public Expenditure Committee chaired by the chancellor - will meet to examine who is on track and who has more work to do.

Summer - normally a quiet time for ministers and their officials - may be rather more lively than usual.

Ever since Sir Humphrey graced our screens in Yes Minister the impression has been forged in the nation's minds that senior civil servants look down their Oxbridge-educated noses at the childish manoeuvring of their intellectually inferior political masters.

All the more striking then that Britain's top civil servant - who's called Sir Gus not Sir Humphrey - has revealed that he and his officials underestimated the capacity of our political leaders to do a deal in the national interest.

In a lecture last night, Sir Gus O'Donnell reported that his team had role-played the political negotiations in preparation for a hung Parliament:

"The good news was that we had practised handling a result that was very close to the real one. The bad news was that, under our scenario, no stable government had emerged".

Sir Gus says that their discussions broke down, unlike the ones which actually took place during those Five Days Which Changed Britain*, He goes on to ask an important question :

"So why, in the event, did the politicians do so much better? I believe it was because, in our role-played negotiations, there was one vital ingredient which was not possible to simulate - and on which, in fact, the founding and sustaining of a coalition rests. That ingredient is 'trust'.
 
"The coalition came together not just because of an alignment of party interest, but because politicians - contrary to the expectations of many - were able to develop the necessary level of trust in each other."

What mattered, he says, was the establishment of a process that would build mutual trust between the parties and politicians involved and hence reinforce a co-operative approach to policy development. It is trust, he concluded, which will be the key to whether the coalition thrives and, by implication, survives.

Lest you think that Britain's top official has got carried away by the excitement of the "new politics" let me relate a relevant tale from this week.

The proposals for a re-organisation of the NHS included a fundamental and little-noticed change from those contained in either the Conservative manifesto or the coalition agreement. The government now plan to give councils a major new strategic health role, examining the purchasing decisions of GPs and fitting them together with their plans for public health and social care. For the Lib Dems, this represents an important injection of democracy into the new health market. For the Tories, it allows them to propose the abolition of primary care trusts altogether instead of, as originally discussed, having to hold elections to them.

This was the result of the first negotiated departure from the coalition agreement. First the Tory Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, and his Lib Dem deputy, Paul Burstow had to agree. Then they had to persuade the Tory Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles. Then the idea had to be taken to the cabinet home affairs committee chaired by the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. Finally, it had to be approved by the coalition committee which considers any major departures from the original agreement.

This is what today's Sir Humphrey sees as the restoration of cabinet government, which is one reason he and some other senior officials are going round praising politicians and not patronising them (in public, at least).

* Five Days Which Changed Britain just happens to be the title of a one-hour documentary I'm making which will air on BBC2 at 2100 on Wednesday 28 July. Please brace yourself for endless plugs from now on. After all, if Alastair Campbell can go on and on about beating me on Top Gear, why shouldn't I go on and on? (Though he also has other more interesting things to say in his Telegraph column today about the reliability of political memoirs.)

Peter Mandelson has now begun to reveal part of the fascinating story of the behind the scenes dealing which led to the formation of Britain's first post-war full coalition government.

I am hard at work on a documentary which aims to tell the whole story, as seen by the key players involved. Tony Blair's switch from proponent to opponent of a progressive realignment is just one example of how the story of five days in May is, in reality, the story of two decades of British politics.

The hour-long programme will air on BBC2 later this month. In the meantime, please forgive the sporadic blogging.

The botched list of schools that won't now be re-built is just the tip of a very large political iceberg.

Labour's Ed Balls can scarcely conceal his glee that Michael Gove, his successor as education secretary, has crashed the ship of state into it.

The row began as an argument about an administrative error, the anguish it caused to communities whose hopes of a new school were first raised and then dashed, and the need for the minister to apologise. However, the row did not subside when Gove - a man known for his old world courtesy - apologised not once but repeatedly. In fact it grew.

The real argument - the iceberg - is about cuts - how big they should be and where they should fall - and about educational philosophy, whether new buildings matter as much as better teaching.

Michael Gove claims that Building Schools for the Future - the scheme beloved of Ed Balls - was guilty of "massive overspends... and needless bureaucracy". He points out that Labour wwas committed to an unspecified cut of 50% in capital spending and insists that new schools will still be built and old ones repaired.

Balls replies that the government is cutting spending on local schools to fund an ideologically driven policy of creating "free schools".

Both in public and in private, Gove insists that the errors in his list are his responsibility and his alone. Others mutter, though, that the new minister has been stitched up by officials who may have forgotten that they no longer work for Balls.

The row has added piquancy since Balls is running to be Labour's next leader and Gove is one of David Cameron's closest allies.

Balls will hope that he has holed the coalition below the water line. Gove must prove that having carelessly struck the iceberg he can now get back to port; patch up the hole and set sail again.

That is how the Speaker described PMQs yesterday in a speech proposing radical change to the weekly joust between the prime minister and possible future PM.

It will be interesting to see how today matches that description and how all sides respond to John Bercow's vivid description:

"We reached the point where almost nothing was deemed beyond the personal responsibility of the Prime Minister of the day, where the party leaders were responsible for a third of all the questions asked (and often more like 50 to 60% of the total time consumed) all set against a background of noise which makes the vuvuzela trumpets of the South African World Cup appear but distant whispers by comparison. If it is scrutiny at all, then it is scrutiny by screech which is a very strange concept to my mind."