The typical wheeze in asthma is a continuous whistling sound heard on breathing out.
Just as I underestimated the sheer hard work involved in writing funny election columns, Cameron clearly thought being prime minister would be a lark, a breeze, and a wizard wheeze, something to chalk up on his business-class bucket list, along with getting a selfie with Helle Thorning-Schmidt and sucking the bass player from Blur's luxury cheese direct from the goat's teat.
And once, a long, long time ago, he thought devolution a pretty good wheeze too.
Worse, this wheeze appears to have emanated not from the deepest counsels of the editorial department, but from marketing and distribution.
As he delivers the punchline, the 77-year-old Hockney howls like he's heard it for the first time: a throaty roar that culminates in a hard-earned smoker's wheeze.
However, some policies attached to budget bills can be passed by a simple majority of 51, using a parliamentary wheeze known as reconciliation.
The morning newspapers reported that Mr Cameron's brilliant wheeze involves making the SNP a time-limited offer of a binding referendum, with a shelf-life of just 18 months.
It creates huge distortions in the economy, allowing importers to buy a dollar's-worth of goods for one peso, a wheeze that drains precious foreign exchange from the country.
Most Tory MPs also realise that a block-the-fire-station blackmail strategy, unleashed at the height of a global economic crisis, is risky.Instead, a supposedly safer wheeze is generating enthusiasm: to head into the next general election promising a formal renegotiation of British ties with Europe, with the results to be put to a "validating referendum".
The Lib Dems' preferred wheeze, a "mansion tax" on expensive houses, was rejected by Mr Cameron who feared tales of widows on modest pensions being forced to sell family homes bought for a song decades earlier.
In order to issue debt more cheaply, the government hit upon the wheeze of tying debt issues to the grant of trading privileges, which cost it nothing but persuaded investors to part with their money at a lower rate of interest.
