THE madness has begun.
And from quite a height.
Up on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower, the Altitude 360 bar, with panoramic views of London, was filled with cheering Tories.
Conservative high command appeared to have employed the usual political tactic of finding a small room and packing it with supporters to make the event look busy and noisy.
At the front, the five Tories of the Apocalypse. Osborne with Hague and May on the Right, naturally, and Morgan and Javid on the Left.
It was noticeable how it looked like a dry run of the leadership election should the blue rinsers lose the upcoming election. The only thing missing was Boris Johnson hanging around in the background in a balloon; or should that be on a zipwire?
When each was asked to say why they would make a good leader, the room erupted into laughter; only Mrs May looked like thunder. Needless to say, answers came there none on the subject of replacing Dave.
The event was aimed at exposing the nasty socialist agenda being peddled by Ed Miliband and the red brigade, which, Treasury number-crunchers had calculated, would leave the UK taxpayer with a £21bn black hole to fill - in just the first year after the election.
Intriguingly, the Tory document with all the numbers stressed how the party had applied a "reasonableness test" to all of Labour's spending promises. The reasonableness being that, unless stated otherwise, it was reasonable to assume the chief comrade would reverse all of the Conservatives' planned cuts.
When it was suggested this itself was unreasonable, indeed a load of nonsense, Boy George pointed to "the perfectly reasonable assumption" that Labour would reverse all the local authority cuts south of the border, amounting to a whopping £3bn, because in the past it had spoken out against them. The ipso facto logic, the argument went, was on the Tories' side.
But when it was noted, quite reasonably of course, that the Tories had promised £7.2bn of tax cuts in the next parliament without saying, ahem, where they would come from, the Chancellor insisted that £9bn of tax cuts had been achieved in this parliament; so the target was, he insisted, "perfectly achievable".
One could not help thinking as the Tory cheerleaders applauded every would-be leader enthusiastically, that once again we had a group of politicians with their heads in the clouds, metaphorically and, on this particular occasion, on a drab grey day in a skyscraper, literally too.
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