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David Cameron has put down a big marker with his speech in Milton Keynes today.

But perhaps the most important thing was :-

And he said the expenses of all public servants paid more than £150,000 a year would be put online – as would all public spending over £25,000.

“Just imagine the effect that an army of armchair auditors is going to have on those expense claims,” he said.

Once a government does this, they will never be able to put the genie back in the bottle.  The sooner it is implemented the better.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the demise of the Liberal Democrat leader, Ming Campbell.  There have been a lot of cruel ageism aimed in his direction.

But is it the reason he got booted out?  So he claims to have resigned, but it’s very much a matter of jumping or being pushed.

Yesterday in Cambridge, I was the oldest by twenty years in the meeting. Was I ignored or treated with disrespect? Did they leave me out of the conversation? Of course not. They did make jokes about did I want to pour the tea and coffee. But then I always do.

So why was I treated properly? Because I had the money!

No seriously, I like to think I was competent and in tune with the group. I was certainly thanked with those sort of sentiments, as they dropped me at the station.

To return to Ming Cambell.

If we look at other party leaders over the past few years, I’ll select two; Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

There is a lot of Duncan Smith about Campbell. Both are dry and have great difficulty in looking happy. They may be competent at what they do, but they don’t give the impression, that if you had to sit next to them, that they’d be much fun. Both their web photos are badly chosen and far too serious.

On the other hand, Michael Howard, who was famously said by Anne Widdecombe to have something of the night about him, is shown happy and smiling on his web site. He is older than Campbell and when he was Tory leader fighting the last election, no-one raised the age question to the same extent as they did with Campbell.

You might also argue that Howard has a very successful wife, Sandra, who used to be a model helps.

But Howard is a man, who is always good for a quote, can be absolutely charming in a media interview and can talk on all sorts of non-contentious subjects like football, cats and the Beatles.

So they may say Campbell fell on his walking stick, but he was unsuccessful because of his attitude. We like our colleagues and politicians to be young-at-heart, but also to have a large dose of wisdom.

The interesting thing about the Campbell sacking, is that our current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, does not appear to be young-at-heart. His face, when being teased by David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Question Time, had a touch of the Queen Victoria about it. 

Perhaps there is too much of the Manse in him.