Interviewed by Andrew Marr this morning the Conservative leader said that Peter Hain cannot go on as yesterday – issuing a statement to the press and then scurrying away without answering questions. Mr Cameron said the Hain situation was another example of the Prime Minister dithering.
Other highlights (not verbatim) of David Cameron’s interview:
- Labour would certainly have lost the General Election if Gordon Brown had called one last autumn – and the Conservatives had every chance of winning it.
- The Tory revival in the polls didn’t happen after Brown had ‘bottled it’ but because voters became enthusiastic about the programme we unveiled at our Party Conference.
- The Osborne and Hain cases are "completely different". All of the Osborne money was declared to the Electoral Commission and an email from the House of Commons’ authorities appeared to suggest that further disclosure was not necessary.
- I support a cut in the amount of money that a party can spend at a General Election – that is when political parties can get "carried away". I do not support controls in between elections because we need to make it fair for candidates against MPs who enjoy big allowances.
- It’s possible that planning for an autumn General Election may have distracted Labour and stopped them from making the decisions that needed to be taken on Northern Rock.
- We need a new Bank of England Act to put the Bank in full charge of decisions to deal with financial crises.
- We will give the Bank Governor a one eight year, non-renewable term in order to strengthen independence.
- We will definitely have a referendum on the EU treaty if it hasn’t then been ratified. If it has been ratified we’ll look at how to proceed then.
Mr Cameron also appeared to say that he will back Labour on nuclear energy but that the Government needed to do much more on decentralised energy and renewable energy.
At the end of the interview Mr Cameron agreed that parliament needed more MPs with backgrounds in small business and in the voluntary sector.