This election started with a prime minister refusing to take part in head-to-head TV debates and went on to be one where he announced his impending retirement. David Cameron may be the first politician to airbrush himself out of the future. Like the Cheshire Cat, he’s gradually disappearing from view, on the basis that strategic silence and tactical withdrawal is what wins votes.

Silence is here being used as a weapon: the man who didn’t want to do head-to-head TV debates on the grounds that they “sucked the life out of the campaign” starts the campaign with an announcement that will do nothing but suck the life out of it.

More telling than the announcement itself was its subsequent defence from Tory spokesmen: “He was just truthfully answering a question.” For someone whose main electoral ploy has been to restrict the opportunities to ask him any questions whatsoever, validating a query is a bold move.

With that precedent set, then, let’s ask some more. In the many, many weeks Cameron won’t be debating his opponents but instead meeting the ordinary hard-working electorate on the streets of Britain, do feel free to ask him some of the following questions:

What exactly are you going to cut?

What are the further £10bn of welfare cuts you need to make but haven’t detailed?

Why did your business minister, Matthew Hancock, say his party knows how the cuts will be made but, when asked further, say they’ll be made “from government”?

Do you accept that parliament will not vote on a possible replacement to Trident until next year?

If so, can you explain why the Ministry of Defence has for the last two years spent £1.24bn on “getting ready” a replacement and preparing “long lead” parts of an as-yet unvoted for missile system?

Is it true that for your first year in office you had no idea of the full scale and ambition of Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms and were furious when you found out?

Why did you abolish the prime minister’s monthly press conference with journalists?

Is it because you don’t like answering questions?

Why did you push the TV companies to schedule as many of the TV debates as possible before the publication of the party manifestos?

How can the electorate question you on your proposals if you’ll take questions only before you propose them?

Do you feel responsible for a political culture in which more than a million benefit claimants were sanctioned and penalised in 2013 but only one HSBC tax evader has been prosecuted?

How can you tease Ed Miliband about a possible pact he may make with the SNP when you know full well you will have to come to some accommodation with the DUP and possibly Ukip?

How do you feel about the rise in suicides of people who have been denied disability benefit?

What’s your favourite type of fish to eat? (Is that the sort of question you prefer?)

Why do we have so many food banks? Why do Save the Children and the Red Cross, two organisations set up to work abroad, now work extensively in the UK?

How do you square launching the “big society” with Iain Duncan Smith’s refusal to meet volunteers from the food bank charity the Trussell Trust in 2013 because he felt they were “scaremongerers” and “political”?

Why did IDS refuse to speak in a 2013 Commons debate on the growing use of food banks? Indeed, why did he leave that debate early?

Is it true you set Miliband up into asking you a “straight” question about VAT at prime minister’s question time last week by getting George Osborne to give a deliberately woolly answer on the subject when he spoke to the Treasury select committee the day before?

Were you pleased with that? Did you see it as some sort of jape?

Do you think you actually live in the Beano?

Osborne was technically misleading parliament wasn’t he?

You do know that your business minister admitted last week that the policy decision on VAT had been taken on Monday, so Osborne could have given a very clear answer on Tuesday to the committee?

How is that “giving a straight answer to a straight question?” Isn’t it actually a clear abuse of democracy?

Shouldn’t at least one of you suspend yourself from the Commons while being investigated for bringing parliament into disrepute?

Do ask him any of those questions. And do tweet the answers. And do the same again with Miliband. He may have had a decent encounter with Jeremy Paxman but that shouldn’t be the end of it. While politicians conduct election campaigns that focus more on how successfully they’re run, and not on the policies they’re meant to detail, then there should be no hiding place from proper invigilation. So, do ask Miliband, why do you not make a speech highlighting the benefits immigration has brought to this country? Why did your work and pensions spokeswoman, Rachel Reeves, say Labour “is not the party of people on benefits”?

Why did you use last year’s launch of The Condition of Britain report from the Institute of Public Policy Research, a fairly progressive document, a copy of which you had placed on the chair of every journalist attending, to headline your tough stance and punitive benefit cuts on young jobless?

If you’re prepared to admit that New Labour made mistakes over wealth inequality and financial deregulation, will you go further?

David Cameron with Jeremy Paxman on the Sky News/Channel 4 programme Cameron & Miliband Live: The Battle for Number 10. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/Reuters

Will you also admit that many of the administrative problems in the NHS were caused by New Labour’s mission to inject private market forces into an organisation not built for that purpose?

Will you admit that much of New Labour’s obsessional drive to impose targets on the NHS pushed staff to breaking point with, to cite one example, paramedics suffering from urinary tract infections because their bosses wouldn’t permit them toilet breaks?

If you’re in favour of commissioning a replacement to Trident, will you or any of your team be making a speech defending the cost and outlining your clear reasons for prioritising a nuclear deterrent over other spending plans? Or is this an awkward subject?

Shall I ask you the fish question I asked Cameron? Or does that just bring back all the stuff about your kitchen?

When so much of the first-, second- and third-generation immigrant community votes for your party, why do you still prefer to use the language of “restricting” immigrant numbers employed by Conservatives and Ukip?

Do you like the unemployed? Or are you embarrassed by them? Do you take it for granted they vote for you? Are you fully aware many of them are turning to the Greens, Ukip and the SNP instead?

Why do you feel the need to talk tough about welfare cuts and immigration levels without much prompting?

You do realise that the slogan Vote Labour, We’re a Little Like Ukip is not going to bring out your base?

To both leaders, you do both realise the greater your silences on policy, the greater the fear it shows on your faces that you have absolutely no idea what the electorate is up to?

You both know, don’t you, that if you engage with us, if you say something sound rather than emit silence, we’ll be all ears? Or are you scared of us? Too scared to talk?