Matthew Dancona

Glutton for punishment that I am, I watched all of the Commons European Scrutiny Committee's cross-examination of David Miliband on Tuesday (you can share my pain by going to the committee's website). Most of the press coverage has focused on the angry exchanges between the Foreign Secretary and the MPs, and particularly his justified fury at the invocation by the chairman, Michael Connarty, of the Munich agreement and Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. This was a deplorable allusion, and Mr Miliband had a duty as well as a right to express the strongest possible objections.

A few weeks ago I was reliably informed by an adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger that the Governator, as a consummate “image man”, had cancelled his trip to the Tory Party conference partly because there is nothing worse than being photographed with a loser. Well, Arnie seems suddenly to have overcome his reservations. Whatever made him change his mind, do you think?

The most important line was George Osborne’s: “From this day on let there be no doubt who is winning the battle of ideas.” That’s right. Darling was chasing the Tories in this statement in a way Gordon Brown never did – or had to - when he was Chancellor, although there was a hint of the future in Mr Brown’s last, supposedly “tax-cutting” Budget earlier this year. For a decade, the public bought into the line that the priority was to “invest” in health and education and that Conservative proposals to make even the most modest tax cuts would lead inexorably to the closure of schools and hospitals and the sending of poor wee children up chimneys.

Just left the Andrew Marr Show, where I was on the sofa discussing the day's big story before the full broadcast of Andrew's pre-recorded interview with Gordon, in which the PM called off the snap election. As I argue in today's Sunday Telegraph, it is only a fortnight since Brown was on the very same show, insisting coquettishly that he would not be providing a 'running commentary' on his election planning. Now it looks as though it is he himself who is 'running' - from the people's judgment which, his pollsters told him, could not be assumed to be positive. So often impressive since he entered Number Ten, Gordon looked evasive and irritable today.

Bookended by the soothing techno of Moby and a (perhaps unintended) reference to Jimmy Cliff's "You Can Get It If You Really Want It", David Cameron today gave a speech that - if nothing else - stretched the boundaries of virtuosity in political performance. To speak with grace and confidence, for more than an hour, with only a few notes was an astonishing feat of memory and endurance. This, of course, is an important part of the Tories' election message, starting today. They want to present Dave as gutsy and up for it, in contrast to Gordon the Ditherer, Bottler Brown. The final passage of the speech was as close to "Come and get it if you think you're hard enough" as this suave Old Etonian will ever get.

I am on a Today Programme panel this week playing a prediction game modelled on the famous Doomsday Clock. The idea is for Michael Portillo, Jackie Ashley, John Curtice, Peter Kilfoyle and myself to guess how close we are to midnight—if 11:45 is the furthest away we can be, and midnight is the calling of an election. This morning, I thought the positive headlines for the Tories would nudge Gordon in the direction of caution, and opted for 11:53. Michael went boldly for 11:57, only three minutes away from blast-off, on the grounds that the PM has made his mind up but is just waiting for Cameron's speech as a final check. We have to update our estimates every day as the political picture changes. I have to send my next prediction in on Wednesday morning. What do Coffee Housers think?