David Cameron needs to get seats wherever he can, given the nationalists in Scotland and Wales and the resurgent Liberal Democrats.
He engages in debate with other leaders, and also he gives these so-called meet the people where he is surrounded by party people and journalists throw occasional questions. Nothing unique in this, nor in submitting himself to one to one skilled interviewing including by the present day Robin Day, Jeremy Paxman.
The fact is that Cameron's so-called big society and radical change is just another way of saying smaller State. It means, for example, charities doing what the State did rather than properly contracted provision. If it can be done for nearly nothing, second best is best. Cuts will slash all over the place. It is the usual Thatcherite conservatism, dressed up.
"So where is the State too big?" Paxman asked him (from memory). Or, he might have said, 'Walk into my parlour said the spider to the fly.' Cameron replied that Northern Ireland is too large and, as another example, the North East.
The point is this. Over the last decades some regions have experienced economic growth through the state sector, including redistributing government jobs to the regions from the London hothouse. It is regional policy. Both the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats have a commitment to regional policy and, the Lib Dems to political decentralisation. But the Tories believe in the market or market substitutes for the free-to-use sectors.
The local press in the two named regions have already picked up Cameron and his statement of cutting the state sector there. He is in trouble. He is showing his lack of experience. He has given another weapon to the opposition, and that 'change' has to be principally constitutional.
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