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Tony Blair, the former prime minister, opposed a referendum on membership of the EU. In a speech at Sedgefield he said that, following the Scottish referendum, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, knew ‘the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice’. Opinion polls following a television debate by seven party leaders, which drew an audience of 7.7 million, were inconsistent. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, was held to have made a mark, while Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, and Natalie Bennett polled at between 2 and 5 per cent. Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, was seen to sweat profusely. He had said that there were ‘7,000 diagnoses in this country every year for people who are HIV positive’ and that ‘60 per cent of them are not British nationals’, yet they could ‘get the retro-viral drugs that cost up to £25,000 per year’. Ms Bennett later floundered during an interview on Radio 4’s Today when asked about a planned manifesto pledge to give every person in Britain £72 a week.
Nicola Sturgeon denied she had said ‘she’d rather see David Cameron remain as PM (and didn’t see Ed Miliband as PM material)’. The claim came in a memo of a briefing by -Pierre-Alain-Coffinier, the French consul-general in Edinburgh, on a meeting between Ms Sturgeon and the French ambassador. Mr Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, said these were ‘damning revelations’; Mr Cameron said the remarks were ‘a widely held view’. The memorandum, from the British government’s Scotland Office, was published by the Daily Telegraph. Two men who spent £9 building a boat out of foam insulation and old bits of wood were rescued by a lifeboat 200 yards off the Essex coast.
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