Cameron forges ahead
David Cameron’s campaign for the Tory leadership received a major boost this weekend with an increase in support both in parliament and among grassroots members of the party.
In a letter to today’s Daily Telegraph, ten Tory MPs have said they will be backing the shadow education secretary, taking his parliamentary support to at least 100 MPs.
The signatories, who include prominent eurosceptic Bill Cash, believe “he can appeal across the political spectrum to voters who did not support us in the past three general elections”.
The news comes after an ICM telephone poll for the BBC yesterday found 76 per cent of party members were backing Mr Cameron, with just 24 per cent supporting his rival, shadow home secretary David Davis.
Mr Cameron’s close ally, shadow chancellor George Osborne, said the campaign was “not taking the contest for granted at all”, but insisted: “We are showing that we are energetic, full of new ideas, and that we are out there to win.”
Mr Davis, meanwhile, has continued to warn the Tories they will not win the next election by being “heir to Blair”, and has been pushing his tax-cutting agenda, which he says would save the average family more than £1,000 a year.
“I actually do think the country should understand what we stand for. I think we’re coming to the end of an era of spin and we ought to be saying what we believe. And it does take quite a time to get this argument across,” he told Sky News.
“This argument of a dynamic economy, a growth-based strategy is not a simple one. As we’ve just demonstrated in our argument so far it’s not simple, but it is absolutely critical.”
Mr Cameron has questioned the wisdom of putting forward such detailed plans four years ahead of a manifesto, but the Davis campaign insists it shows that their candidate has real, practical policies, compared to Mr Cameron’s vague call for change.
One of his supporters, Damien Green, admitted that were the election to be held today, Mr Davis may find himself in the runners-up spot.
But he added: “In the battle of ideas he can set out what a David Davis opposition would mean, what a David Davis government would mean and inviting our party members to look at the substance of what they will be inviting other people to vote for in 2009.”
Ballot papers go out to 300,000 party members this week and on Thursday night the two Tory leadership candidates will go head-to-head on a special edition of Question Time. A decision on the new leader is expected on December 6th.
