In his Guardian interview, Mr Willetts warned changes in attitudes to marriage were "extremely dangerous".

"The aspiration of marriage is becoming harder to achieve," he said.

"Instead of it becoming just what you do in your 20s, it has become like scaling Mount Everest, a sort of great moral endeavour - and something that requires a lot of time and money. We think we need to ease some of the pressures.

"There is quite a lot of evidence coming from America about how we are in danger of heading towards a society where middle-class people get married and people on low and erratic incomes don't get married, and that in turn leads to a divergence of a whole host of other outcomes.

"In my view it would be extremely dangerous if marriage became something only for the affluent elite and that is what will happen, unless we try to get some kind of policy that restores it as a more widespread institution as we had in the past."

"Instead of it becoming just what you do in your 20s, it has become like scaling Mount Everest, a sort of great moral endeavour - and something that requires a lot of time and money. We think we need to ease some of the pressures.

Great, our next government is going to be a bunch of fools who can't differentiate between cause, effect and mere correlation...

Doesn't sound much different to the current one.

Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

Democracy rocks!