A bout of election fever at Westminster today, after confirmation that the Budget will be on March 24, making May 6 even more of a certainty as the general election date. Inevitably, it spread to  Prime Minister's Questions. David Cameron rattled off the criticism by former armed service chiefs of Gordon Brown's record in funding the Ministry of Defence. "All Tories" barked a Labour MP.  Cameron went ballistic, demanding an apology from Brown for the accusation that the chiefs were unpatriotic.
Brown repeatedly took refuge in the row over the "non-dom" tax status of Lord Ashcroft, the deputy Tory chairman. That had nothing at all to do with the level of defence spending, of course, and didn't work. Cameron produced the best line -- and it looked spontaneous-- when Brown said the last Tory Government had cut the defence budget in the 1990s. The reason, he said, was that "we won the Cold War."  Tory MPs adored that. All Brown managed to reply was that Cameron was "at school at the time." Brown 1, Cameron 2.