Prime minister says Ed Miliband will never be elected unless he accepts need to cut borrowing
Britain needs to go "further and faster" in reducing its fiscal deficit, David Cameron has said as he claimed that the loss of Britain's triple-A credit rating highlighted the need for pressing ahead with balancing the public finances.
The prime minister taunted Ed Miliband by saying that he would never sit on the government side of the House of Commons unless he accepted the need for cutting borrowing.
Miliband experienced one of his most awkward moments at prime minister's questions when he dismissed the New Statesman magazine – one of the few publications to endorse his leadership campaign – after Cameron quoted a recent article calling for Ed Balls to be sacked.
Reading from the article on 20 February by Anthony Seldon, the author of Brown at 10, he said: "Let's examine the fact that the New Statesman, the in-house magazine of the Labour party, says this: his critique of the government strategy will never win back public trust, his proposals for the economy will never convince, his credibility problem will only become magnified as the general election approaches."
The prime minister added: "That's not Conservative Central Office. That is the New Statesman."
Miliband then managed to offend one of his few media supporters when he replied: "With the greatest of respect to the New Statesman, he is scraping the barrel really by quoting the New Statesman."
Helen Lewis, the magazine's deputy editor, immediately tweeted: "Better to be talked about than not talked about, eh? #silverlining".
Lewis then tweeted that she had just finished work on a new logo for the New Statesman. This was a picture of a barrel over the words "Since 1913", the year the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the magazine.
Sensing Miliband's discomfort, George Osborne leaned over to the prime minister, apparently passing on a piece of intelligence. Cameron then said: "He says the New Statesman is scraping the barrel. It was the only newspaper that endorsed his leadership.
"I have to say in this Oscar week perhaps the best we can say is Daniel Day-Lewis was utterly convincing as Abraham Lincoln and [Ed Miliband] is utterly convincing as Gordon Brown – more borrowing, more spending, more debt."
Lucy Powell, Miliband's former chief of staff, tweeted to say that the prime minister was wrong. "Actually The People also backed Ed in leadership! #PMQs," the Labour MP for Manchester Central tweeted.
Miliband's slip overshadowed his attempt to highlight the major blow to the government after Moody's stripped Britain of its triple-A rating last week. The prime minister replied by saying that the move highlighted the need to cut the deficit even more quickly.
Cameron said: "This credit rating does matter. It demonstrates that we have to go further and faster on reducing the deficit. But the very fact he won't answer the question about wanting to borrow more – he will never sit on this side of the house when he won't answer the questions about what the house needs to know."
Downing Street said afterwards that the prime minister was not signalling a change of approach. Osborne had pledged to eliminate the structural budget deficit by 2014-15 and to see debt falling as a proportion of GDP by 2015-16. He has postponed both of these.
The prime minister agreed with Sir Peter Tapsell, the father of the house, who said Britain had, in common with the US and Japan, seen the costs of its international borrowing rates fall after losing its triple-A status.
The prime minister said to Tapsell: "[You] make an important point which is while I don't deny for one second the importance of the ratings agencies the most important test of credibility, which is a test you face day in day out in the markets, is the rate of interest at which you borrow. The rate of interest at which we borrow is still at record lows."