Moment of 2010

The ConservativeHome team begins their Picks of the Year with their choice of 'Moment of 2010'.

Jonathan Isaby's pick: My moment of the year has to be the Downing Street Rose Garden press conference given by the newly installed Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister on May 12th, which I was privileged to witness at first hand. The chemistry between Cameron and Clegg was palpable - leading to jokes about it being a civil partnership - and persuaded me that Clegg was serious about the Coalition being a five-year commitment. Click here to see a clip of the pair publicly sealing the Coalition deal that afternoon.

Tim Montgomerie's pick: Without agreement to the election debates we would probably now have a Tory government. The debates catapulted the Liberal Democrats to by-election status. They should have been squeezed in a tight election contest between Labour and the Conservatives. Instead the campaign was dominated by the Clegg bubble. If, as Paul Goodman argues, Cameron's post-election "comprehensive offer" to the Liberal Democrats was a political moment of the decade (today's Times (£) calls it the biggest political act of the post-war period), David Cameron's agreement to debates was (predictably) the most stupid political decision for a very, very long time.

Paul Goodman's pick: Easy. David Cameron's post-election announcement of May 7, in which he made his "big, open and comprehensive offer" to the Liberal Democrats. By the time he'd finished, it was evident that Cameron stood a good chance of taking his Party with him (because of the terms in which his statement was crafted), that the political momentum was with him, that Brown was unambiguously on the defensive, that a Conservative-led Government was now very likely, and that a re-alignment of British politics to the centre-right was potentially taking place. In effect, Cameron was moving to counter Roy Jenkins' vision of a re-alignment to the centre-left - a manoeuvre that Tony Blair funked making after his 1997 landslide. This could be the political moment not only of the year but of the decade or even longer.

Harry Phibbs' pick: David Cameron entering Downing Street as Prime Minister for the first time.