Tory Davids vie for votes
David Cameron has denied claims today that his campaign for the Conservative leadership has been based on hollow rhetoric.
Shadow home secretary David Davis accused his younger rival, who is dubbed “the heir of Blair”, of pursuing “image-led” politics.
But Mr Cameron fought back, telling the BBC’s Sunday AM programme that Mr Davis’s “right wing core vote” strategy would lead to defeat at the general election.
Mr Cameron said the party needed to change: “If we play the same tunes, we end up with the same song, we’ll end up with the same position in the charts – second.”
Both men were interviewed separately by Sunday AM host Andrew Marr, just days after their televised Question Time debate.
On Friday, 300,000 Conservative party members across the country were sent ballot papers and have until December 5th to cast their votes. The two candidates will now go before a nationwide series of hustings.
Mr Davis acknowledged that he was still behind Mr Cameron in the polls but said that he was picking up support and believed he could still win in the ballot. Support for Mr Cameron was “softer” than the polls suggested.
He said it was time for a change in political direction as they came to the “end of the era of Blair.” Mr Davis said: “What I’m saying is ‘now is time for a different approach, a principled approach, a direct approach, what you see is what you get approach’.”
He repeated his desire to cut taxes but said the Tories needed to do more to convince voters they were prepared to do this.
But Mr Cameron, who appeared separately on the same programme, said that planning future tax cuts now was a “misjudgement”.
“What we can’t do is try and write the whole of the 2009 manifesto in the next few weeks,” he said.
Mr Cameron also defended his controversial call for the party to consider downgrading ecstasy from a class A to a class B drug.
“What I want is a drugs policy that works and not just one that sounds good,” he said.
