THE TELEGRAPH: The Foreign Secretary tells Mary Riddell he believes the Tory party lacks purpose and that he doesn’t do sleepless nights.
In a sparsely-filled town hall, David Miliband is rallying the party faithful. Crawley in Sussex is not the normal beat of a globe-trotting Foreign Secretary, and the issues raised by activists are not his specialist topics.
With a majority of only 37, the most marginal Labour seat in Britain needs all the big guns it can muster. So Mr Miliband gamely tackles doorstep subjects ranging from immigration to free swimming for the over-sixties.
The meeting over, he turns to the subject of Lord Ashcroft, who hopes to swing this vulnerable constituency and many others to the Tories. Mr Miliband was on a radio show with William Hague when the shadow foreign secretary finally admitted that he had known for months about the arrangement under which the peer pays no British tax on his overseas earnings.
In the strongest condemnation by any government minister, Mr Miliband declares his opposite number unfit to serve as Foreign Secretary. “You can’t be an effective Foreign Secretary if you spend 10 years avoiding the hard questions,” he says. “Either Lord Ashcroft was lying to David Cameron and William Hague, or they were lying to themselves.” >>> Mary Riddell | Sunday, March 07, 2010
