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Platform 5, Birmingham New Street: Delicious. The Panorama team has just seen David Cameron on to the train home to London. Thanks to an extraordinary coincidence, the Tory leader finds himself sitting in the next door carriage to the prime minister, also on his way back from Birmingham. If either needs to pop to the gents or for a cup of tea, they may well meet halfway.
On board the train to Birmingham: Never before has any one train seen quite so much political traffic. I am travelling with the Tory leader David Cameron up to Birmingham to make a Panorama to be broadcast at the time of the Tory conference.
By remarkable coincidence, the cabinet and the prime minister are making the same journey. One cabinet minister brushed past Mr Cameron and myself on his way through first class to make the point perhaps that in these straightened times, he and other members of Gordon Brown's top team would be travelling standard class. I'm told that word went round on Whitehall that that might be a wise thing to do.
Happily perhaps, for Mr Cameron and Mr Brown they managed to miss each other. Mr Cameron joking that he managed to get there first not just because he's travelling on an earlier train, but because he took his shadow cabinet to the West Midlands two years ago.
Meantime, ringing in our ears is the prime minister's declaration that "my own response to the great challenges in my own life has been to confront them, resolute in the belief that there would always be something that could be done to overcome them and there always have been".
This is, it seems, a licensed reference to those things that he so rarely likes to talk about, the loss of an eye because of a rugby accident when at school, and of course the tragic loss of his daughter a few days after she was born. The point presumably of this is, I assume, to remind people that Gordon Brown is tough, determined and can bounce back after terrible adversity. The question is whether that answers voters' concerns.
What the PM is being told by his advisors is that the public want to know his analysis of what's gone wrong and what he's going to do about it. In other words, that he is capable of self-awareness and analysis. Expect more uncharacteristic Brown introspection in the weeks to come.
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My series on The Prime Ministers is on Radio 4 (Tue 0930, repeated Sun 2245) - or click here to listen. Most recent:
And Decision Time, on how ontroversial decisions are reached behind closed doors in Whitehall, was on Radio 4 on Wednesday 11 March at 2000.
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