David cameron

The general election campaign has entered the final stretch and each day between now and polling day, we’ll be producing a short lunchtime podcast looking at the day’s campaign developments. Today, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss Labour’s new housing pledges, the 5,000 small businesses backing the Tories, the hysterical talk of the SNP threat — as well as the unfathomable state of the opinion polls. You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

David Cameron has been bugged in this campaign by the question of whether he’s passionate enough, of whether he really wants it. When Fraser and I asked him about why so many people aren’t sure of whether he has the passion for it a few days back, he replied, ‘I don’t know. There is something about me—I always manage to portray a calm smoothness or something.’ He then went on to explain why as a Conservative he wants to know what the plan is, not just what the passion is. As he quipped, ‘plan plus carrying out a plan equals dream. Dream plus rhetoric equals chaos.’ But in a speech

The Prime Minister’s claim that he supports Aston Villa has never been quite believed by football fans. And today, it seems, he has changed his allegiance – telling an audience (above) that they should support West Ham. CCHQ has not, as yet, come up with an explanation as to why he didn’t say Aston Villa (other than the fact that he’s no more a Villa fan than Gordon Brown was an Arctic Monkeys fan – his biography has plenty references to villas, but none to Aston Villa). But when the explanation comes, Mr S will update. UPDATE: The Prime Minister may have been exaggerating his attachment to football. Here are some quotes, before

If someone accuses you of doing something that you haven’t done, there’s a really easy way of convincing them that you are not in fact guilty. The first thing you can do is deny the accusation. Very clearly, emphatically and categorically. Let me give you an example taken completely at random: ‘Are you accusing David Cameron of being personally to blame for the refugee crisis in Libya and hence the deaths of hundreds of desperate people in the Mediterranean?’ Now, can anyone think of a good way of answering that question which would be unequivocal and make it clear beyond any doubt whatsoever that this is not in fact what you

The election campaign is becoming increasingly dominated by a small party whose raison d’être is to preach independence from membership of a union it claims is hindering national ambition. But the party is not Ukip, which had been expected to play a big role in this election. It is the Scottish National Party, which seems ever more likely to hold the balance of power after 7 May and is determined to use it ruthlessly to its own advantage and to the furtherance of its sole objective: the dissolution of the United Kingdom. Nicola Sturgeon has been the only party leader talking about the virtues of national self-government, and she has

The Tories’s not-so-secret weapon has finally been deployed. Boris Johnson hit the campaign trail with David Cameron today, solving a jigsaw puzzle, painting with some children (above) and exuding a bonhomie missing from the campaign so far. But the dangers of letting Boris loose were also seen in an interview on Sky News. When asked, multiple times, by Kay Burley if he would like to succeed Cameron as Tory leader, Boris edged a scintilla closer to saying ‘yes’. At first, the Mayor of London deflected: ‘By 2020, I hope I will still be alive and still in Parliament but kaleidoscope of politics will have changed and rotated. There will be

So both the BBC and Andrew Marr have admitted to misquoting David Cameron as having said that foxhunting was his favourite sport. But what did Cameron himself think of Marr’s self-described ‘cock up’? Well, The Spectator caught up with the Tory leader earlier today and asked him about it – and here’s his answer: ‘The old mental filing system, you’re going ‘drrrrrr’ through, and thinking… but I knew the article because I wrote it myself… I just thought maybe there’s something else. You never know, something might have been written by someone else. So I thought it was bollocks. And it was bollocks.’ Was there perhaps a spot of truth