Peter Hoskin

The Tories dust off their baseball bats

Is it just me, or have the Tories developed a slightly harder edge in the couple of days since the Pre-Budget Report?  We had an unusually acidic address from David Cameron yesterday, in which he likened Brown ‘n’ Darling to “joy-riders in a car smashing up the neighbourhood,” and criticised the PBR for its “irresponsibility, basic deceit and complete lack of moral principle”.  There have been a couple of quite powerful attack posters from CCHQ.  And now we’ve got George Osborne saying that Brown may have “betrayed the responsibilities of the office he holds.”

“So what?” you say, “they’re the Opposition – it’s their job to oppose.”  Well, yes, of course.  But that opposition seems to have been concentrated over the past few days.  So much so, in fact, that it smacks of a new strategy on the Tories’ part: the kind of baseball-bats-at-the-ready approach which Iain Martin advocated

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