David Cameron is keen to demonstrate his willingness to give straight answers to straight questions at the moment. But there is a limit to his candour. Anyone who asks him about whether he’s preparing for another hung parliament will be told that he’s not thinking about, that he’s going all out for a majority.
However, the Spectator knows of two conversations that David Cameron has had about what he would do in a hung parliament in recent weeks. In both of these, his message was the same: he would rather do another coalition than attempt to run a minority government. For this reason, Cameron won’t—as Boris Johnson suggested he should this week—rule out another coalition.
Last autumn, senior Tories were very bullish about the prospect of running a minority government. One figure at Number 10 talked about the ‘f off number’, the number of MPs they would need to govern without the Liberal Democrats.
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