Exclusive: Tories confront Lynton Crosby over ‘barnacles’ distracting from election message

Last night’s meeting of the 1922 Committee was, I hear, not a particularly well-attended affair. This is odd because the speaker was Lynton Crosby, whose confident briefings tend to cheer Tory MPs up no end. But sources who were there say there no more than about 30 MPs in attendance.

Crosby gave a short presentation in which he urged backbenchers to return every discussion they had in broadcasts and on the doorstep to the economy, but was then confronted by John Redwood over what the senior backbencher felt was a failure of message discipline from the government. Redwood complained that ministers were repeatedly distracting from the economy at the same time as backbenchers were being lectured about sticking to talking about that topic. He mentioned the watered-down version of English votes for English laws, the decision to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes and continued rumblings about what school teachers can or can’t say about gay marriage.