Whenever yachts and Tories are mentioned in the same sentence the alarm bells should start ringing in CCHQ. For some inexplicable reason IDS has taken it upon himself to praise an NHS trust for spending half a million pounds of public money on a 72ft ocean racing yacht. The yacht has been used as part of a scheme to help the unemployed, and IDS is all for it:

“I love coming to projects like this, people have great ideas and we need to replicate them. If they are getting people ready for work, however it’s being done, even by buying a yacht, then let a thousand flowers bloom. Sometimes the national press says something is a bad idea and everybody agrees, but I would invite David Cameron to come up here.”

Somehow Guido doubts he’ll accept the invite. Back in 2009 Dave attacked the decision to spend taxpayers’ money on the yacht:

“Recently the NHS brought a yacht and moored it in a Hull marina. This was a completely crazy decision…If this extravagance had been published for all to see, the people who made this decision would either have had to justify it or scrap it”.

Oh, and that “thousand flowers bloom” reference is a quote from Mao. How things change…