Now it’s not often that, in a complete range of today’s front pages the one you’d single out to agree completely with is the Daily Express. In fact, even typing that feels strange.

Nevertheless, there it is. Iain Martin in the WSJ put it bluntly a few days ago: Ringfencing of overseas aid and the NHS means no Harriers. Whilst you’d argue that prolonging the shelf-life of the venerable and vulnerable Harrier wouldn’t be the first priority with the saved money, his general point is well made:

One choice that David Cameron and George Osborne made in opposition was to ring-fence the NHS and the relatively small, but not insignificant, overseas aid budget. This was designed to provide the Conservatives with a shield during the election. Who could say that the Tories were uncaring if they were protecting aid to poor people abroad and maintaining the flow of resources to nurses and doctors?

The problem is that the money is actually going to corrupt dictators in Somalia, drug barons in Afghanistan and an inefficient and shambolic bureaucracy which is the second biggest employer in the world (the Russian army has shrunk). And people are beginning to realise, at last, the truth of at least the first of those two facts.

Why is Cameron following Brown’s self-aggrandising promise to pay for palaces and guns in Mogadishu instead of opting to defend our shores? For the same reason that he put a windmill on top of his house – so that he could appeal to the Guardianista chattering classes. The problem is that they might give him grudging credit over their tofu but they’ll never vote for him.