Nick met a nurse, Gordon met a cancer patient, Dave met a black man from Plymouth. The leaders' eagerness to demonstrate how in touch they are with 'real people' and to use them in the popularity stakes is a little toe-curling, even when the accounts are accurate. But the three anecdotal encounters which David Cameron used during last week's debate have unravelled to his detriment and to the further alienation of an already cynical electorate.