Cameron leaves the goal open for Clegg and Miliband on tax avoidance

It’s fashionable to say Downing Street isn’t very good at strategy. So fashionable, in fact, that sometimes journalists worry they’re being unfair to the Tory leadership. But today we saw yet another example of the Prime Minister leaving an open goal for not just the opposition party but also his own Coalition partners to score. On Monday, Google’s Eric Schmidt visited Downing Street for the regular Business Advisory Group meeting. He was allowed to leave by the back door, and the Prime Minister’s aides were adamant that David Cameron wouldn’t ‘confront’ the Google boss on his company’s tax arrangements. All he planned to do was to take the group through his agenda for the G8, they said.

So today, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband jumped into the void left by Cameron’s reluctance. After his ‘I love Coalition’ speech this morning, Clegg told journalists that even if the Prime Minister hadn’t spoken to Schmidt about tax, he had.