I can recall a very experienced local government officer saying, “don’t look for logic in politics, you will never find it.”

His words keep coming back to me the longer I live.

Our nation is going through hard times and it seems that wherever you look, public services are having funding slashed and there is a real impact discernable on standards of service.

We are warned that there is more austerity to come and the national debt is still at an eye-watering level.

So, it raised my eyebrows when the coalition government, on an initiative from the Liberal Democrats, introduced a directive that children aged five to seven should be provided with a free hot dinner at school. This is to cost £1 billion a year.

The Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, sought broadcasting opportunities to trumpet the introduction of this new school dinners scheme and he obviously took great personal pride and satisfaction in it.

That is, he did so until he ran into a nine-year old schoolboy called Rohan, a pupil at a London school.

Rohan responded to an invitation to speak to Nick Clegg on a phone-in programme broadcast by LBC Radio. I did not hear the programme myself but I have read a published transcript of the exchange of verbal shot between the schoolboy and the Deputy Prime Minister. There can only be one interpretation of this and it is that Rohan got the better of Mr Clegg.

The point Rohan insisted on pressing in his questioning was that surely the government could find more pressing needs on which to spend £1 billion a year than school dinners, particularly as many of the parents of the children receiving the meals could well afford to pay for them?

Nick Clegg tried to justify the expenditure by claiming improved academic performance by the children being fed on the subsidy from tax payers but Rohan was having none of this and hit back by showing that he had done his research thoroughly.

The claims for improved classroom performance show only a tiny improvement.

Although Rohan didn’t actually state it, the figures for classroom performance improvement recorded on trials of the school dinner project are tiny and would probably be discounted by statisticians when margins for error are taken into account.

No doubt realising that he was getting the worst of this debate with the boy, the transcript shows that Nick Clegg resorted to becoming patronising and suggested that Rohan probably needed to return to his class and even suggested that he might have been coached by an adult in what to say.

However, an investigation after the broadcast disproved this.

Rohan made the call from his school with the full knowledge of his parents and headteacher but without any coaching being needed.

Rohan is clearly an exceptionally bright and articulate young man and he had on his side logic and common sense.

As the free school meals were being served, Cancer Research UK was claiming that cancer treatment in the UK is under severe pressure and is near to collapse.

This alarming announcement was followed closely by the Alzheimer’s Society pointing to the need to give more funding to the care of Alzheimer’s sufferers that is woefully underfunded.

Watch for the Government response to this being, “we can’t afford it”.

If that is indeed the answer given to these two charities, let us hope that young Rohan is turned loose again to bring the clear logic of a nine-year-old brain to help get priorities right.