Put 5 May 2011 in your diary.

It may make or break Britain's first post-war coalition.

It's the date on which Nick Clegg has persuaded David Cameron to stage a referendum on changing the voting system.

Mr Cameron tried but failed to persuade his deputy that an early vote was an early risk for the coalition. He asked Mr Clegg to focus on the risk of the referendum being lost on the same day as the government is punished at the polls. Wouldn't many Lib Dems conclude, he asked, that there was no point remaining in the coalition?

Mr Clegg insisted that he needed an early win for the Liberal Democrats in the coalition - particularly after they, and not the Tories, have been blamed for the VAT-hiking Budget. He argued that holding the referendum on the same day as elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh assembly, and local councils in England will increase interest and turnout.

Next Tuesday, the cabinet will be asked to back Mr Cameron's decision to give in to Mr Clegg's demand.

There is, though, another vital vote to be won before 5 May. Getting the legislation through Parliament will be the first big test for the coalition whips.

Many Tory MPs believe that they were misled into backing a referendum on the alternative vote in the frantic coalition-building days which followed the general election. David Cameron told his party that Labour had promised Nick Clegg electoral reform without a referendum. Mr Clegg has since said that that is not true. This will give some the excuse they are looking for to rebel.

In order to woo his party, the Tory leader is linking the referendum to the Conservative manifesto promise to equalise the size of constituencies - which should give the Tories a few more seats.

However, this may give Labour an excuse to vote against the legislation if it wants to cause the coalition trouble.

How, you may wonder, could Labour oppose a referendum on AV when it was the first to propose it, and promised it in the Labour manifesto? The answer's simple. It's the opposition's job to oppose.

Labour's new leader will be elected before the big Commons votes on voting reform.
He or she may recall the example of John Smith. The arch pro-European made John Major's life hell when he refused to help him take on his rebels on the Maastricht Treaty.

"Mayday Mayday": trouble looms for the coalition.

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A lot of heat and very little light was generated by today's PMQ's exchange about rival statistics measuring the job cuts resulting from the government's budget.

Harriet Harman deployed the Guardian's leak of a Treasury forecast that between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs could go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 could disappear in the private sector by 2015.

David Cameron responded by flourishing a newly published Office of Budget Responsibility forecast to claim that his government's proposed public-sector pay freeze would save public sector jobs compared with Labour's plans.

So, what's the truth?

The OBR and the leaked Treasury figures tell roughly the same story about public sector job losses - the OBR forecasts 490,000 job losses by 2015 and 610,000 by the following year.

The OBR forecasts do show - as David Cameron claimed - that public-sector job losses in the next two years would be 150,000 higher under Labour but this comparison rests on the assumption that a newly elected Labour government would not have announced a tougher pay restraint policy than it had originally planned. That's doubtful.

The OBR forecast predicts net growth in private sector employment - of around 1.3 million. It does not show the job losses that will result from the loss of government contracts - which is, I'm told, what's shown on the Guardian's leaked forecast.
Of course, all these are mere forecasts.

The government believes - or should that read "hopes" - that "rebalancing the economy" will allow private sector growth to more than replace the shrinking public sector.

The true political significance of today was, I suspect, that David Cameron predicted that unemployment would fall in this Parliament. If he's right, these forecasts won't matter much. If he's wrong, it's a prediction he will regret ever having made.

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For the self-proclaimed new kid on the block, the test of his first summit was not going to be the wording of the final communique but the impression he made.

On that test, David Cameron flew home from Toronto last night feeling pretty satisfied.

The prime minister both impressed and slightly intimidated his fellow G8 leaders when it was revealed that he'd not just gone for a morning jog at their Canadian retreat but had then dived into the lake for a spontaneous swim.

On the summit family photocall, one leader after another can be seen asking him to point out where he'd taken the plunge. Clearly feeling his masculinity threatened, Silvio Berlusconi circulated a photo of himself posing in trunks - taken, it should be said, a few decades ago.

The image which gave the new boy the most satisfaction though was that of him aboard Marine One - President Obama's official helicopter - travelling from the G8 retreat to the G20 in downtown Toronto. While other leaders had to drive the over-140 miles, the prime minister's aides were boasting that the special relationship "had taken off again".

Back on the ground, the two men swapped beers - the outcome of a drawn bet about whose team would beat the other in the World Cup. They also swapped warm words about how David and Barack would work together.

And work together they must. Both men sense the mounting political pressure of the rapidly escalating death toll for their forces in Afghanistan and the steadily decreasing public support for their continued presence there.

On the economy there can be little doubt that the president felt more comfortable with David Cameron's predecessor than with him. If Gordon Brown had been at this G20 summit, he and Barack Obama would have stood together to warn of the risks of cutting support for the economy too fast.

As it is though, the president chose to help his new ally, praising him in front of other leaders for taking the "necessary courageous action" to tackle Britain's budget deficit.

The same officials who worked on Gordon Brown's summiteering now work with David Cameron. They've been struck by their new boss's cool, calm confidence on the world stage BUT they're quick to point out that he's benefited from the guilt felt at the White House about how they mishandled the first meeting between Brown and Obama.

What they've told the prime minister is that this may be as good as it gets.

The image of this summit that many will see at their breakfast tables this morning is of David Cameron with his head in his hands... when he watched England trounced 4 -1 alongside Germany's Angela Merkel.

If things do go wrong for him in Afghanistan or the economy, that image may well be used to sum up the fate of a hapless British leader on the world stage rather than to show the global new boy trying to enjoy the football at his first summit.

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