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Alas, this weekend sees the last ever edition of Straight Talk with Andrew Neil, over on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News Channel - but the final guest, Lord Patten of Barnes, the artist formerly known as Chris Patten, has an interesting take on the Coalition.

ANDREW NEIL: It's your kind of government isn't it, it's a centrist, kind of one nation Tory, government?

CHRIS PATTEN: Yes it is. One of the things that amazes me with this endless sort of Mills and Boon literature which rains down on us from Lord Mandelson and from Andrew Rawnsley and others which tells us about how the previous united Labour government got on, I'm surprised that people make such a fuss about the difficulties of a coalition government between the Lib Dems and Conservatives, because I suspect that there's a lot more unity of purpose here than there was with Blair-Brown. It is difficult because, for years, Conservatives and Lib Dems have fought one another tooth and nail in constituencies, so expecting people to get on at Westminster is a bit of a challenge. But yeah, I think they're doing pretty well.

AN: Let's look a little bit about what's been happening - I think we all know that Mr Blair regrets squandering the early years that we had in office after '97 whereas David Cameron seems to be a prime minister in a hurry - we've had, look, welfare reform being announced, reform of the NHS, schools, constitution - all pretty radical, but the Times said that the real lesson of New Labour was: "Reform requires rigour and time rather than mere political capital and enthusiasm." Who's right?

CP: Well, I think that there is a slight danger of the government looking a little breathless. There's a rather sort of frenzied rate of activity which is understandable as the government attempts to demonstrate that it has an agenda of reform quite beyond dealing with the public finances. I think political reality is going to bite pretty hard this autumn when the government has to announce how it's going to deal with the deficit over the next few years, and I think that's going to determine the politics of the period ahead. But what I think is admirable is that some ministers - Kenneth Clarke for example, Vince Cable for example - have made it plain that they don't just see public spending contraction, necessary as it is, determining the priorities for the next few years. They think this is a time when we have to reorganise public services and in the process probably spend less money, and concentrate much more on outputs than inputs, and I think Vince Cable - I didn't agree with everything he'd said - but I thought he made an extremely interesting speech on higher education about that, and I totally agreed with what Ken Clarke said about the prison population.

Lord Patten also discusses the planned spending cuts, the referendum on voting reform, higher education and a graduate tax, and Europe, and you can see the whole thing on the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News channel, on Saturday 24 July at 4.30am and 11.30pm, on Sunday 25 July at 1.30am and 11.30pm - and on Tuesday 27 July at 3.30am.

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