THE tinsel is still up and there are mince pies left in the fridge but despite the festive period lingering in the nation's mind the 2015 General Election has begun in earnest; the gloves are well and truly off.

The first round dripped with negativity.

Labour began the shroud-waving, insisting the nation's beloved NHS would all but be killed off if David Cameron and his cronies again got their mitts on the service - south of the border, that is.

The Tories, meantime, got the Treasury number-crunchers to work on Labour's commitments, comments and hints on this and that policy and came up with a £21bn black hole in just the first year of the next parliament.

More spending by Ed Miliband, they warned, would of course mean higher taxes and more borrowing; the past revisited.

But at the Conservatives' five Minister press conference, there was a degree of incredulity from reporters that so much of the Tory fire had been based on assumption using, what Chancellor George Osborne, called the reasonableness test.

Within minutes it began to look unreasonable.

Ed Balls branded the Tory document a "dodgy dossier", explaining how he had made clear a future Labour government would not reverse all the £5bn cuts in public services.

The Tories claimed Labour had opposed cuts to the arts and suggested they would reverse them at a cost of £83m but the Shadow Chancellor again made clear there would be no new money for the sector in 2015/16.

Also it emerged a 2013 pledge by Labour to ban putting waste food into landfill, that would cost £477m to the Exchequer in lost revenue, had been quietly dropped last year.

Yet for all the rebuttal, the political point about a gaping black hole had been made and lodged in the voters' collective memory.

In the rounds ahead, there will, of course, be other subjects to bamboozle the electorate with by means of claim and counterclaim.

Immigration and Europe will, thanks to the Faragists, be high on the agenda but so too, like never before, will Scotland.

The counterintuitive after-effects of the referendum mean the SNP is riding high and looking at, potentially, holding the balance of power at Westminster. So what happens north of the border in the next few weeks means more to the future of the UK like never before.

Amid the vertigo of electioneering, the voter needs all the help he and she can get. So the Labour suggestion that the independent forecaster, the Office Budget Responsibility, should be called in to audit the parties' manifestos seemed like a good idea.

Indeed yesterday it was backed by Lord O'Donnell, the former head of the civil service, who pointed out how officials disliked being asked to cost opposition policies as in the Tory document.

But, Conservative high command insisted this was not the right time; the OBR was a young organisation and needed more years to bed in. The suggestion would be looked at after the election.

Spin, it seems, rules; for the time being anyway. Only 122 days to go.