Robert Hanks: Tory race rivals soothed by Radio 2

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Clarke attacks his rival as a 'hanger and flogger'

When politicians want to score points at Westminster and get some good column inches in the serious dailies, they go on Newsnight or Today and settle down for a good mauling by Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys.

But when they want to appeal directly to the voters, they turn to Jimmy Young.

That's especially true when it's Conservative voters they are after: two decades after he emerged as Margaret Thatcher's favourite interviewer, anybody with serious thoughts of inheriting her mantle knows that it is essential to get on the right side of JY (Tony Blair's eagerness to appear on the "Prog" only confirms it).

To do justice to him, Baroness Thatcher's affection for JY was based in part on an appreciation of his intellectual qualities, which include a cool ability to grasp all the salient facts, and a knack for spotting what politicians aren't saying. But she also saw eye-to-eye with him on a range of political issues ­ his distrust of the political left and trade unions provides a strong undercurrent in his 1973 autobiography, JY.

So it was notable on Wednesday how often Mr Young pressed Iain Duncan Smith to admit he was offering a return to Thatcherite values.

When Mr Duncan Smith mentioned the unions as a bar to reform of the NHS, JY seized on the idea: "If push came to shove, as Mrs Thatcher famously said on this programme once, 'If I find people confronting the old, the sick, the weak and the poor, I will confront them, by God I'll confront them' ­ you're saying the same thing?" Both here and when interviewing Mr Clarke, JY didn't come across as quite the steel trap he once was. Perhaps his age is finally catching up with him; although there has long been uncertainty about his precise years, he is believed to be 76.

Still, it did strike me he gave Mr Duncan Smith a particularly easy ride, feeding him easy questions and not fussing too much about the answers.

Mention was made of the Sunday Telegraph poll that awarded Mr Duncan Smith 76 per cent of constituency votes; but it was left to Ken Clarke, in the second half of the programme, to point out that many authorities did not regard this as a fair or objective poll. Even worse, JY allowed Mr Duncan Smith to get away with recycling his line about Tony Blair's receding hairline. This was a risky ploy: Radio 2 listeners know when they are being fobbed off with old gags; they have been trained by decades of The News Huddlines.

If Ken Clarke didn't get so many favours, he probably doesn't need them: he was his usual genially imperious self, confidently pooh-poohing the absurd notion that there could be any mismatch between a Eurosceptic party and a Europhile leader.

During the past few years, Radio 2 has spent a great deal of time and money trying to promote itself as a station for younger listeners; the kind of soothingly familiar fare served up here won't have helped its cause one bit.