DRIVING back last night from hosting my first hustings in the marginal seat of City of Durham, I fell to wondering about the nature of the relationship between the three parties whose representatives had sat alongside me on the panel.

The three candidates, Roberta Blackman-Woods (Lab), Carol Woods (Lib Dem) and Nick Varley (Con) were very orderly and good-natured, thankfully.

The dynamic between the two leading ladies is fascinating and led me into wondering how it might be possible for, given that we may be heading for a hung parliament, Labour and the Lib Dems to find themselves in bed together (an unfortunate turn of phrase I realised as soon as I had said it from the chair).

I find that, certainly among the ground troops, there is a grudging respect between Con and Lab. Each knows the other is completely wrong, but usually they seem to accept the other's right to exist.

The Cons and the Labs hate/detest/despise the Lib Dems. It is if the two big parties are the elephants of the establishment and the Lib Dems are mice scurrying around their feet, trying to trip them up and driving them into ever greater frustration.

The mice are slippery characters, very close to the ground, well organised and good at listening. They run this way and that as the mood, and the opportunity, presents itself, rapidly changing their position.

The mice have all the energy of a fast-growing weed: if the elephants allows them to stand still for a second they will take root and spread (as the elephant sees it) uncontrollably. This is what has happened in Newcastle and Durham.

Therefore, the elephants have a constant desire to trample on the mice, but it is very difficult for the lumbering elephants - which like to think of themselves as certain of their certainties despite their constant talk of perpetual change - to pin the mice down.

Indeed, the elephants feel that the mice have a nasty streak to their nature, that the mice deliberately and unfairly leave up-turned tiny tin tacks for them to tread on. When an elephant feels one embed in its foot, it howls in anguish about the nature of these vindictive and unjustified personal attacks and smears.

The mice, though, say the elephants are such pompous slow-moving creatures - afterall, it took 15 years to create New Labour and even today, after 13 years, the electorate appears to be doubtful about how much the Conservatives have changed - that they deserve to have their tails tweaked.

Plus, say the mice, because we are so small the only way we can get our voice heard is by making the elephant trumpet about us.

So I reckon the Conservative elephant hates/detests/despises the mouse because it seeks to upset the centuries of certainty which still inform Conservative thinking.

But I guess that, deep in its heart, the Labour elephant hates/detests/despises the mouse even more because it can see itself down there. It made its name by being the voice of the undertrodden, by tickling the soles of the establishment from below. On a literal basis, the Labour elephant can see itself in the mouse because - and I have no mathematical proof for this assertion - many Lib Dems once flirted with becoming a friend of the elephant, of taking out Labour membership, but then they scurried off into a different mousehole.

The TV debates have given the squeaking mice as equal a voice as the trumpet of the two elephants of the establishment.

The elephants, who have been unable to stamp out the mice with their own feet, have wheeled out their big guns, huge blunderbusses of weapons that fire ever more wildly and indiscriminately at the increasingly confident mice.

FIRE! "Hung parliament will risk economic disaster" (Times). FIRE! "Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem donors and payments into his private account" (Telegraph). FIRE! "Wobble Democrat" (The Sun). FIRE! "Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain" (Daily Mail, the mammoth of the establishment).

But will these blasts and bludgeons from the establishment halt the progress of the mice?

What if they only injure the mice, make them even madder than they really are.

Because the will of the people appears to be that one of the elephants of the establishment should cuddle up to the mice to form a government that, trunk to tail, will lead us out of the current economic crisis.

Is that possible given how much the elephants hate/destest/despise the mice?