As each day passes, David Cameron sounds like the Slog postings during February and March 2010. “Ohmygawd it’s gonna be like really awful yah?” is Dave’s new mantra as he gets increasingly into the role of Bad Cop. Word reaches me that some Tories have steam coming out of their ears about just how much rope Nick Clegg is being given as Good Cop, but they’re wrong: the accurate bearer of bad news is hated at the time, but feted by history.

In fact, while the increasingly tabloidised media are pushing the Good Cop/Bad Cop line, the reality is somewhat different. In an Observer interview Nick Clegg said progressive governments such as Sweden and Canada in the 1990s had made “really painful” decisions, including cuts to welfare benefits, but had “brought people along with them” with debate and consultation. I know our resolutely loyal Dietrich von Ausland will applaud this Cleggobite, but George Osborne is putting forward similar ideas. He told Bloomberg TV late last week:

“If you look at countries that have successfully done this, like Canada in the 1990s, their whole approach was to take a much more fundamental review of government expenditure than a pro-rata cutting exercise … we’ll be setting out this week how we want to do that.”

However, it was Cameron who had the bottle (at last) to say that the coming cuts – and they will be much, much deeper than the thin shavings we’ve seen to date – “could very well change our way of life forever”. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has been saying this since the turn of the year, being as it was not in search of an election wheeze. But as always, we must observe that this is better late than never.

What I rather suspect Osborne won’t be doing is spelling out the precise nature of the life-changing exercise we’re about to undergo. This is the bit politicians don’t want to talk about, and most voters don’t want to think about. The say/think correlation is what has enabled our leaders to get away with it thus far.

Whether that mutual denial will continue depends on all manner of things – and which of them penetrates the national semi-consciousness first. An NHS mired in off-balance sheet debt, a police force stretched to the limit and distracted from the plot of catching bad guys, a social worker complement underpaid and overworked, a defence force (literally) unable to move for want of funds, an EU anti-matter hole sucking what funds we have out of the UK…..and above all, an exporting private sector so frighteningly small, any incoming Government of whatever hue would do anything rather than recognise its near sub-atomic size.

But whichever way you look at it, Cameron has been showing a fair degree of commonsense in recent days. Stung (and, I hear, incandescently angry) about the Right tunneling under the Coalition via the Daily Telegraph, the Prime Minister is racing out of the monetarist closet at one helluva lick.

Today he said that interest payments by 2015 would he higher than the education, transport and climate-change budgets combined, and almost twice the annual revenues from taxes on company profits.This suggests that Dave had had exponential maths, compound interest and logarithmic debt escalation explained to him. We should all be thankful for this.