Highlights of David Cameron’s interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday AM:
- The party remains unpersuaded about the case for a longer period of detention without trial. Post-charge questioning is a better way forward.
- Digby Jones was "considering" running as Tory candidate for London Mayor. He hopes as Labour’s Trade Minister that Lord Jones will remain as frank about Labour’s failure to listen to business as he was in the past.
- Many of Gordon Brown’s Constitutional reforms were Tory ideas first but Gordon Brown is ignoring the really big issues – the European treaty and the consequences of devolution.
- The Conservative Party is setting the agenda – eg on more independence for the NHS and the importance of the environment.
- Spinning hasn’t died with Gordon Brown – it has been reborn. Last week’s announcement on local people having a say on how councils spend their money was a case in point. There’s no new money behind the announcement of something that is already underway. [Iain Lindley has the background].
- Labour are not the change. The team now in place was also the team that "bankrupted" the pensions industry, imposed stealthy taxation, closed A&E and maternity wards, took away the right to have a night-time visit from a GP and made it so difficult to register with a dentist.
- Family breakdown is the great cause of our social ills including teenage pregnancy, addiction, failing schools, high crime rates and large prison populations. We must begin a long-term, generational change to ensure that the tax and benefit system recognises the decision to come together and stay together.
- Half of cohabiting couples split up by the time a child is five but it’s only one-in-12 for married couples.
- We need a cultural change in favour of parenting, fatherhood and marriage.
- Responding to criticisms of Sayeeda Warsi on alleged homophobia and support for talking to extremists, David Cameron says that it should be welcomed that the Conservative Party has a British Muslim around its top table. She supports, he continues, Tory security policy and will help the party connect with diverse communities.
- It is for Boris Johnson to decide whether he stands as London Mayor. He is not going to put the "black spot" on him.
- Andrew Marr’s suggestions that the reshuffle partly reflected a determination to make the shadow cabinet less posh were dismissed as "rubbish".
- There is a huge gulf between Gordon Brown’s top-down, centralised view of the world and the Conservative view of helping families and other social institutions mend Britain’s broken society.