Warnings can be like buses; you wait for one and then three come at once.

Our field of columnists at Conservative Home are deliberately spread across the spectrum of Conservatism and indeed, conservatism. And when, without co-ordination, or suggestion two very different ones send you articles agreeing, and are followed very quickly by two young contributors offering the same message you sit up and notice.

David Gauke and Miriam Cates don’t agree on a great deal, bar both being former Conservative MPs, but this week, they did: neither of them think the triple lock on pensions should escape severe scrutiny, now, with a view to radical changes to it – if not abandoning it altogether.

Two students happened to offer similar views quite unprompted by me, or those columns and we have run those too. One from Anna Ridgway, and the other Binyamin Jayson.

This argument gets a lot of flak. Even suggesting meddling with pensions gives two groups of people a rush of blood to the head; people of pensionable age and political strategists on the right.

The first, and I’m really not far off that age myself, make a fairness argument. ‘We have paid in all our lives, worked and paid taxes, it’s now time some of that money we paid is returned for our old age.’ It’s a strong argument, and often loudly deployed.

Political strategists, most recently in the Conservative Party, and Reform UK, but also on the left will tell you, particularly for those two parties, such debate is like political suicide. Why, the argument goes, would you upset and annoy the very people most likely to still vote for you, at a time when every vote counts, every margin in polling is worth more than it ever was?

Both arguments, on the right at least, have prevailed.

Neither the Conservatives nor Reform will countenance ending the triple lock, yet.

I say yet because Miriam made the case most powerfully last week that Westminster has an open secret. Almost everybody knows it, academics, economists, commentators, journalists and politicians that the triple-lock is ultimately economically unsustainable.

The truth is very few will insist on keeping it except on electoral grounds, though they studiously try to avoid admitting that. It’s ‘about looking after the older generation’ – and the coda – ‘It’s surprisingly popular with the younger generation’.

It’s true as one senior Tory told me that its future would be much better with  greater economic growth, but as part, a big part, of welfare spending it will, eventually, drag every bit of available public money into its orbit and break the public finances.

The fact is we are at the point – probably beyond it looking at our demographics – where such truths cannot be ignored or kicked into the long grass as has been political instinct for many decades.

It is now a fact that the expectations of what the public think they should and can have from the state long ago outstripped the state’s actual ability to pay for it. This is nailed own even harder if we are remotely serious, and we damn well should be, about funding defence far better than all parties have over the last forty years.

I’m not sure what Reform’s plan for defence spending is. They don’t seem to have a defence spokesman, but if it’s radical and expansive then their decision to leave the triple lock alone for now, seems odd. But then, just as for the Tories, it’s really all about them votes.

Don’t take my word for it. Tim Montgomerie, friend, founder of this site, and now avowed Reform supporter told the Spectator as much.He made the valid point that back in the day we had as a nation not been great to our pensioners and the triple lock had pulled many out of poverty. But he went on to say the priority for him was for Reform to win votes so he could see why Reform had left it alone.

Both Cates and Gauke came from different points to a shared conclusion that doing so, just have the Tories have is shying away from the tough decisions. Bizarrely this led some of the more egregious new converts to Reform to suggest that questioning pensions in the context of unaffordable welfare spending at all is now somehow ‘left wing’!

However it is the Conservatives who I think are more surprising here.

The pitch so far, and I warmly welcome it, is that the party needs to be honest with the public, even when it may be unpopular, and forge a complete rethink of the public finances. Ergo, we cannot carry on borrowing and spending and expanding public debt like it had just sat down for a hypno-therapy session with Zack Polanksi.

If that’s true, and it is, then ignoring the triple lock is like advocating a very spartan diet and saying ‘well except for the 8 cream teas you can still eat every day.

It should also play into the sensible fairness argument around the two child benefit cap the one Reform wanted to scrap, then didn’t, then waited to say for definite until after poor Rob Jenrick their now Treasury spokesman voted the wrong way.

Pensioners argue it’s not fair to simply remove a benefit they paid into all their lives – regardless of whether they are well off or not. But youngsters (remember the ones it’s supposed to be so popular with – ‘looking after our grandparents’ etc) have started to question the logic when they find out what it’s going to cost those of them lucky enough to find a job, whilst knowing it can never be there for them.

Fewer people working harder to pay for more and more who don’t, or have ceased to, is not a maths that makes sense to them, inter-generational care or no. They still want to look after their grandparents  – that is popular – but when they see how that actually works out for them, I wonder just how popular it really is to just keep going as we are.

Indeed I’ll bet my state pension, that, whichever party wins the next election will either face an opposition that will change or abandon the triple lock, or be a government that having got into power starts the conversation about moving away from it. Which frankly feels a bit dishonest and smacks a lot of the biggest complaints about this Labour government.

I’ve been told by the most senior Tories, that there’s no likelihood of abandoning it in this Parliament, and they are pretty coy of even the slightest suggestion of it in the next.

But as my generation and my parents’ generation slip the way of all things in the years to come, I genuinely wonder if those that follow will think we were too scared to accept balancing the public finances  should involve looking at spending on all society not just the working age population and the wisdom of maintaining a stubborn uneconomic ring fence thrown around some – some of whom who don’t actually need it.

It seems after this week, I’m not the only one who also thinks that’s odd.

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