C&P
David Cameron: What the experts say
By Brian Reade 4/02/2010
Few financial journalists in Britain are held in higher esteem than Jeff Randall.
He has been business editor of virtually every heavy newspaper, was the first journalist to be given that title by the BBC and now has his own peak-time show on Sky.
In a peerless career, he has been showered with awards for his honesty, integrity and grasp of City matters.
In the late 1990s, as editor of Sunday Business, he had many dealings with the head of communications at Carlton TV, David Cameron.
And this is what he wrote when he became Conservative party leader in 2005: "I wouldn't trust him with my daughter's pocket money.
"In my experience, he never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative.
"Whether he flat-out lied I won't say, but he went a long way to leave me with the impression that the story was wrong. He put up so much verbal tracker you started to lose your own guidance system."
Randall was not alone among business journalists in holding Cameron in utter contempt throughout his seven-year stint at Carlton. Like him, some pull up just short of calling him a professional liar.
Chris Blackhurst, City editor of the London Evening Standard says Cameron was "aggressive, sharp-tongued, often condescending and patronising.
"If anyone had told me then he might become Premier I would have told them to seek help."
Patrick Hosking, investment editor of The Times, said: "He was obstructive."
Most damning of all is this assessment by veteran City journalist Ian King, who calls him "a poisonous, slippery individual," adding: "He was a smarmy bully who regularly threatened journalists. He loved humiliating people, including a colleague at ITV he would abuse publicly as 'Bunter', just because the poor bloke was a few pounds overweight.
"He was a mouthpiece for that company's charmless chairman, Michael Green, who operated him the way Keith Harris works Orville."