There are a lot of gems in George’s Magic Medicine, as Yvette Cooper referred to the Chancellor during the Autumn Statement. The infrastructure opportunities will create jobs, improve transport links, and improve the country generally. Better spending on schools will help reduce social divide and increases in benefit and pensions cannot be criticised.

However, as the Today programme observed, it’s a little bit of everything, rather than sweeping universal gesture. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It means all areas benefit to some extent.

However, measly concessions such as only 100,000 people to be helped to buy homes and the media 430,000 youth work placements were not really go far enough to address the wider issues.

However, the extremely left-wing proposals are largely because of the coalition-the Liberal Democrats have fought tooth and nail to get both through.

As Tory MPs were saying on peanut politics on Sunday, they would prefer the cuts to be more severe. Thank goodness we are in coalition.

The ugly is the future. When the coalition formed in 2010, the Tories faced the future as something they’d have to put up with until they got an outright majority. That was based on the predictability of political science, the dance of boom and bust; the ability to sell the privatised banks and annihilate Labour before shedding the crutch of the Liberal Democrats.

But with the global economic crisis, like deadly aftershocks following the banking crash earthquake, the future is far from predictable.

The coalition has been forced to sell Northern Rock, embrace in illiberal intervention in Libya for little gain and try and stay afloat as the Eurozone fractures.

None of this was predictable and all of this makes the future even more uncertain. It certainly suggests that a future Tory majority is extremely unlikely.