Has David Cameron settled on a strategy for dealing with his opponents in the EU referendum? The Prime Minister was clearly caught on the hop by the decisions of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to back the ‘Out’ side at the weekend, and his angry digs at the Mayor in the Commons on Monday showed that. But later in the week, the Prime Minister tried to patch things up a little by saying that Boris was a ‘great friend’, which suggested an attempt at least at calming things down.
But today in response to Michael Howard’s decision to back Brexit, Cameron said that claims made by those like the former Tory leader (though he didn’t name Howard) that EU leaders might make new concessions in the event of a vote to leave were ‘complete fiction’. This is rather more emollient than his divorce joke that apparently came at Boris’s expense on Monday, but still shows that the Prime Minister isn’t going to treat his opponents with kid gloves.
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