Tory grandee attacks Cameron for ‘talking up’ the SNP

David Cameron may believe he has found a game-changer by making SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon's hold over Ed Miliband a key election issue. But he has been warned by the respected former Tory Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth that he is playing with fire.

Lord Forsyth, once a close confidant of Margaret Thatcher, has told The Guardian that by “talking up” the SNP in order to damage Labour, Cameron has taken “a short-term and dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country”.

Forsyth congratulated Ed Miliband for the “brave” way in which he stood up to Sturgeon in last week’s TV debate and criticised Chancellor George Osborne for praising Sturgeon’s performance.

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“Ed Miliband was actually rather good when he did actually for the first time seem to make it absolutely clear that his priority was to unite the country and to have nothing to do with the separatists. I thought that was a brave thing for him to do,” said Forsyth.

“We’ve had the dilemma for Conservatives, which is they want to be the largest party at Westminster and therefore some see the fact that the nationalists are going to take seats in Scotland will be helpful. But that is a short-term and dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country.”

He also accused Cameron of stirring up English nationalism in the wake of last year’s Scottish referendum result.

“David Cameron, instead of going up to Scotland the next day and saying ‘Look, we’ve got to look at this now from the point of view of the whole United Kingdom’, started this English votes for English laws thing which was not really a unionist position and that shattered the unionist alliance against the break-up of the United Kingdom.

“I personally don’t support English votes for English laws. It doesn’t seem to me to be a very good policy to try and deal with the rise of Scottish nationalism by stirring up English nationalism… We need to find ways of binding the United Kingdom together, of binding that partnership together.”

Lord Forsyth said the problem dated back to the period 2007 – 2011 when the Conservatives propped up Alex Salmond’s minority SNP government at Holyrood. This had encouraged Tory supporters to vote tactically for the SNP to keep Labour out.

“The result was that in constituencies in the north-east of Scotland and so on, lots of Tories felt they had permission to vote SNP to keep Labour out. So you got tactical voting and that got the SNP into the Tory heartlands.”

His devastating critique of Cameron’s election strategy is believed to reflect wider misgivings in the Tory party while the former Liberal leader, Lord [David] Steel, told Radio 4’s Today programme that Forsyth was “correct – the Tories are doing the SNP a favour by bringing them to the centre stage of the campaign”.

William Hague, the Tory leader of the Commons, who is quitting Westminster at this election, defended Tory tactics this morning.

“I don't believe we are talking up the SNP in any way,” Hague told the Today programme. “We have to point out the dangers, that unless there is a Conservative majority in two-and-a-half weeks the people who want to break up the UK will be running the UK.”

Alistair Darling, the former Labour Chancellor who successfully led the No campaign in the Scottish independence referendum, condemned the Tories' warnings about Labour as "absolute nonsense". He accused Cameron of a "dangerous destructive embrace with the nationalists".

The BBC's deputy political editor James Landale reports that the Conservative campaign team, led by the Australian Lynton Crosby, is determined to continue with warnings that Labour will be ruled by Sturgeon “believing it will bring wavering voters back to the Tory fold”.

Today the Tories are wheeling out former Prime Minister Sir John Major to reinforce the attack on Labour over its reliance on the SNP if there is a hung parliament at Westminster.

Sir John will say: “This is a recipe for mayhem. At the very moment our country needs a strong and stable government, we risk a weak and unstable one – pushed to the left by its allies and open to a daily dose of political blackmail.”

Miliband meanwhile is spending this week concentrating on the issue that is providing real cut-through for the Labour Party: “Saving the NHS”.