More potent than the sum of their parts...

I couldn’t help but have a little snigger when Clegg turned to Cameron, looked into his eyes and said “together”.

But apart from those moments of sugary sweetness – this was as impressive as it was fascinating.

Their joint PR power was much more potent than the sum of its parts. I saw a sci-fi movie once where a bunch of mini-robots all joined together to form an all powerful uber-robot. This was the political equivalent.

They played off each other’s jokes, nodded at one another, made each other seem legitimate and justified.

But most of all they made the idea of coalition change from being something that seemed like urgent crisis management in the face of an inconclusive election last night, to being a vision and something that might inspire people this morning.

I have no doubt that the public will warm to this kind of joint press conference, if nothing else because it’s so novel. Rarely have they seen politicians of different parties talk like this.

The problem is that for the moment it is not the public, but their own MPs that they need to take with them.

I spoke to one Tory MP earlier who simply did not want the coalition to work, because they did not want it to become a positive advert for coalition politics.

Meanwhile the public themselves will only get carried away until they realise the horrific cuts that this brotherly coalition is going to implement.

Labour meanwhile will need to pick its leader very carefully to face off the challenge that Clegg and Cameron present.

The eventual leader will need to be able to drive a wedge between the pair, without being labelled as the person who didn’t want politicians to work together.