James Forsyth James Forsyth

To win the election, the Tories must learn to fight dirty

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

issue 20 February 2010

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics

Having to work on a Sunday is a chore — doubly so when that Sunday is Valentine’s Day. But there were plenty of worker bees at Labour headquarters on Victoria Street last Sunday, devoting themselves to the passion of their life: hounding Conservatives. They came to rebut a document that the Tories had just released on how Britain has grown more unequal under Labour. Late in the afternoon, all their Valentine’s dreams came true: they found a mistake.

Somehow the Tories had managed to claim that 54 per cent of girls under 18 got pregnant in the most deprived areas of the country when the actual figure is 5.4 per cent. To make things worse, this was not just a decimal point in the wrong place in one table, but a mistake that appeared three times in a document containing a foreword by David Cameron.

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