Over the next few days, what David Cameron will mainly be praying for is a Cleggogaffe. Gaffer Brown would never have been willing to fall on his sword, but the Duffy-gaffy moment ensured he would shoot himself in the foot. So with Gordon down to just the one foot, it’s a two-horse race – if you follow.

Cameron needs more than a scandal to open up his lead: scandals are no longer much kop for getting rid of politicians, because their behaviour is scandalous most of the time anyway. Tell people that Nick troughed his way through £2 million of taxpayer’s money while working for the EU, and voters shrug in an enigmatically bored way. Tell them that (allegedly) his porn candidate has carnal knowledge of the LibDem leader, and the men at least will smile. No: these days, only a gaffe will do.

The Gaffe can be a stake through the heart if it involves gays, women, ethnic minorities and other bigots. But it’s hard to see what might befall Slick Nick – and difficult to imagine how bad it would have to be to dent his surge. Can you dent a surge? Perhaps one gaffes a surge, I’m not entirely sure.

I suppose if Clegg called the Pope a paedophile kraut, it might do the trick. But as we’ve seen before, while Mr Clegg is prone to the smartarsed insult, he’s also very good at buttoning his lip when necessary. Can you make a gaffe without speaking? Absolutely: weeing on a policeman would be frowned upon by the Law & Order vote, and sticking two fingers up to Martin Bell wouldn’t play well on the whole. But like I say, it’s all very unlikely.

So instead, Cam (for this is all The Sun ever calls him now) has taken out a contract. Not on Nick Clegg, I hasten to add – but with the British People. It’s got sixteen points in it, and yesterday Cam signed it on a big piece of cardboard – but quite obviously not on impulse: the presence of half the world’s media is the clue to my conclusion on this one.

Murdoch’s currant bun featured the event this morning, but there’s a Tory blunder here (thankfully, not quite a gaffe) because sixteen points is too many. Sun readers cannot conceive of a Universe in which lists have more than ten things you never knew on them, and thus the content of Cam’s contract probably evaded them. This may well have been the idea: certainly, The Sun didn’t show any of the points.

But the Digger’s more upmarket title was available to spill a few more beans. Ever the stickler for accuracy, The Times observed that the contract

This is a scoop on the same level as Hitler’s memoirs, and certain to dilute the case put by Native Americans that they were there before the Paleface. But it still didn’t clarify the sixteen points, so it was left to the Daily Mail to insist that

Let’s be clear about this, these are brave pledges – although not altogether unpopular. Also, they are elephant-free: there is, for instance, no pledge to pay back the 1.3 trillion quid we owe the rest of the world by the time your youngest is a granny. In fact, we shouldn’t really see them as pledges so much as allegories. Or bollocks.

The document is headed ‘The contract between the Conservative Party and the British people’. If only the Times had been asked to set the type, and accidentally produced ‘The contrast’. That would’ve been more accurate. And most definitely a major gaffe.