The Lynton Crosby question Number 10 can’t quite answer

It’s difficult to find a Tory MP who doesn’t think Lynton Crosby is making their party more aggressive and impressive. The Wizard of Oz has been a good thing. Most MPs think his tough-talking vision for how the party can fight Ukip and Labour rather than fighting one another has made a huge difference.

Crosby was hired to advise the party on strategy (as well as swear at people), but the one thing that makes a few MPs want to swear back is the possibility he has had some undue influence over the government’s public health policy, which has zig-zagged one way and then another. As James said earlier, this row will keep going, and Number 10 did nothing after PMQs to slow things down.

‘He advises the Conservative party on strategy, not the government’s policy,’ a Number 10 source repeatedly said. Isn’t policy a strategic concern? Can he express an opinion on a policy he thinks is strategically bad? Has he ever advised Cameron about whether plain packaging of cigarettes was a strategically bad policy? All these questions were unanswered. Number 10 said that he had ‘never lobbied’ the Prime Minister on this issue, but refused to answer the question of whether he had discussed the matter. Sometimes journalists get a bit worked up about semantics, but the distinction between ‘lobbied’ and ‘discussed’ and Number 10’s willingness to deny the former but not the latter is enough to keep hacks digging for a long time.

But then Grant Shapps appeared on the World at One to say Crosby ‘has absolutely nothing to do with the policy side of things, he doesn’t advise us on policy, I’ve never had conversations with him about it’. Can Number 10 say the same about the Prime Minister?

The Tories are trying to fight back with two letters (here and here) from Julian Smith to Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham about a former senior adviser to Miliband, James Barge, who joined Philip Morris International last October. Meanwhile Labour wants the Cabinet Secretary to investigate whether David Cameron has breached the ministerial code. The party has also put this photo out on twitter mocking the PM’s tobacco strategy, which is a continuation of that funny ‘Benson and Hedge Funds’ joke at PMQs. This isn’t a row that will have a great deal of purchase with voters either way. But Number 10 is managing to give it more purchase with the media than it needs to.