Steve Baker speaks as though the Tories have already lost

It’s pretty unusual to hear a minister speaking during this election campaign: other than Mel Stride, the rest seem to have gone to ground entirely, either because they want to save their own seats or because they don’t want to be associated with the campaign at all. So when Steve Baker popped up on Andrew Neil’s show on Times Radio this lunchtime, that in itself was pretty remarkable. The Northern Ireland minister then accepted that the Tory betting scandal looked ‘terrible’, and did not bother to defend the delay in suspending the two Tory candidates who are alleged to have placed bets on the election date. He merely said: 

The public deserves to know that we hold ourselves to a higher standard than we hold anyone else and also, of course, if war is a continuation of politics by other means, and our very old saying, we should remember that politics is war minus a shooting and one should never expose a flank.