Lynton Crosby: I didn’t discuss plain packaging with the PM

After weeks of the Prime Minister and his team dancing on a semantic pinhead over whether they discussed plain cigarette packaging with, or were lobbied by, Lynton Crosby, the man himself has made a rare public intervention. The Press Association reports him denying that he had ‘any conversation or discussion with or lobbied the Prime Minister’ on plain packaging. Crosby added:

‘What the Prime Minister said should be enough for any ordinary person.’

But it wasn’t really, because David Cameron did rather lose his cool on the Marr Show at the weekend, telling Andrew Marr that his insistence that Crosby had ‘not intervened’ was ‘the only answer you’re getting’. While this isn’t a row that is likely to percolate outside the Westminster bubble, especially when most people are caught up in royal baby fever, Crosby’s plain-talking denial that he even discussed the issue does beg the question of why the PM and his advisers have been so cagey about saying the same. Why not just say that Cameron and Crosby have never discussed the issue? If Downing Street is struggling so badly over its messaging, it probably needs Crosby to work for it full-time in the run-up to the election just to stop stories like this bubbling away for so long.

UPDATE, 17.05: Perhaps in an effort to kill this story (finally), Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has sent this letter to Ed Miliband about Crosby, along with these ‘principles of engagement’ to avoid any conflict of interest. Surely it would have been easier to release these from the beginning…