Will he cut or won't he cut? And, if he does cut, where will he cut?
If that reads like a line from Yes, Minister it is because I feel as befuddled as poor Jim Hacker during one of Sir Humphrey's contorted briefings.
It was only last week that David Cameron announced that a Conservative government would halve the UK's £175bn budget deficit through a series of public spending cuts.
There was no alternative (pace Margaret Thatcher).
Fast forward to the present and it emerges that shadow chancellor George Osborne has identified only £1.5bn in public spending reductions. Now Cameron says the swingeing cuts that were inevitable last month would not now be needed.
That the gap in the polls between the Conservatives and Labour has narrowed to just 7% would doubtless have had little bearing on the Cameron-Osborne flip-flop.
So does this mean that frontline public sector services, including those in social care, are now safe? If this double-act knows what is good for them, they will have to state that this is indeed the case.
Sadly, all we have is Osborne's eight-point plan for recovery which he announced yesterday. The measures, which can be summed up as the bleedin' obvious, include getting people back to work, improving schools and the NHS and ensuring the entire country shares rising prosperity.
How any of these could be achieved - some of which would require public sector investment - was not explained.
As BBC News reported last night, all Osborne could offer when questioned on financing this programme was that it would become clearer when he had "seen the books" - a cliché that represents the last refuge of the clueless occupied by all shadow chancellors when referring to those secret files of economic mismanagement eternally hidden in the 11 Downing Street bunker.
If this is the case, how can Osborne and Cameron be so sure that public spending will not need to be slashed?
In fact, it is plausible that public spending cuts will not have to be as severe as originally thought, because revenue from income tax rises as unemployment falls. But that would be an admission that Labour is working.
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