The Daily Mail has another four and a half pages from Lord Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron on Wednesday. In news terms, it is starting to get a bit thin – one of the spreads is about Cameron being posh, and another is about colleagues thinking he does not believe in much – but the material is very readable and there are some interesting revelations.
Wednesday's Daily Mail front page: Victory! #tomorrowspaperstoday #bbcpapers pic.twitter.com/tZsIxOaj3S
— Nick Sutton (@suttonnick) September 22, 2015
Here are five of them.
1) Boris Johnson secured more than £90m for policing in London by threatening to disrupt the Conservative conference if he did not get the money, the book claims.
In 2011, with the economic recovery yet to take root, the chancellor was desperate to have a ‘quiet conference’ with ‘nothing unexpected’.
He rang Mr Johnson to instruct him to behave, noting that in 2009 the mayor had overshadowed conference by writing a newspaper column, published on the day of Mr Osborne’s own speech, demanding a referendum on the Lisbon treaty.
The mayor replied that he was staring at a ‘blank page’ for his latest column, and that his price for ‘no mischief’ was £90m extra for policing in the capital.
Before he put the phone down, the chancellor had agreed to hand over £93m.
Mr Johnson told aides: ‘That was the best-paid column ever.’
2) Margaret Thatcher thought Cameron was shallow.
The book describes her reaction to the 2010 manifesto:
According to a well-placed source, she was certainly unimpressed by the title of Cameron’s first manifesto: Invitation to join the Government of Britain.
‘What is this? What is this?’ she spluttered on being shown a copy. ‘Invitation to join the Government of Britain?
‘People don’t want to join the Government of Britain. They want to elect the Government of Britain, for it to govern!’”
And it says that Thatcher was disparaging about Cameron to friends.
Thatcher’s friends confirm that she never did warm to David Cameron.
‘She thought he was shallow, really. She’d say: “If you’re leader, you’ve got to believe in something,” ’ says one of her former confidants.
3) In 1990, when Margaret Thatcher resigned and John Major, Douglas Hurd and Michael Heseltine were contesting the leadership, Cameron, who was working for the party at the time, told all three campaigns that he was backing them.
4) Cameron agreed that Greg Dyke could be a joint Conservative/Lib Dem candidate for London mayor in 2008.
Dyke was set to stand, but the Lib Dems backed out at the last minute. Later someone suggested that Boris Johnson should be the candidate. Cameron initially dismissed the idea out of hand, saying Johnson had “totally the wrong profile”, before he relented.
5) A former KGB officer has said the KGB did try to recruit Cameron when he visited the country as a teenager in 1985.
After Cameron first talked about this meeting, and suggested that the KGB were trying to recruit him and the friend he was with, the Kremlin dismissed the story, saying the men who befriended the young Britons were homosexuals. But the book contains quotes from Igor Kuznetsov, a former KGB colonel, who claimed that he was involved and that it was a recruitment attempt.
