Did you know that the Tories’ adviser on cuts within government, is chairman of the UKs biggest private healthcare firm, which has admitted that it will benefit from job cuts in the NHS?

Sir Peter Gershon, said that the NHS would save “£1bn to £2bn” by curbing recruitment – which estimates say translates into 20,000 to 40,000 jobs.

Sir Peter also chairs General Healthcare Group, the UK’s largest private sector healthcare firm. on their website, a strategy paper states that the NHS will face a “very severe contraction in its finance with an £8-10bn cut in real terms likely in the three years from 2011.”

It continued: “Given this lack of funding growth, there will be an increasing role for the private sector, even if NHS efficiencies can offset some of the budget pressure.”

The real rot of this is that David Cameron neglected to mention Sir Peter’s interests when he presented the efficiency savings report.

It is based on the savings noted in the report that the Conservative felt they could afford to cut back the proposed National Insurance increases.

Reason #6: Cameron’s efficiency savings take money and jobs out of the public sector and into the private.

David Cameron will do anything to maintain his image, but whether he can follow through on his promises is another matter.

And I’m not talking about policies or manifestos –  we all know that election manifestos are at best an opportunity to set out what a party would offer us in an ideal world, and it’s a naive voter who expects them to be followed through to the letter – or even to any extent – after the party is elected. So for this reason I am not going to analyse the manifesto – to try and decipher exactly where the Tories think they’re going to get the money they promise to save from (no sums in the manifesto – maybe Ashcroft will pay for it all?)

But there are some promises which we do need to take more seriously – and when caught out on these, we need to question the integrity and moral fibre of the individual in question.

So it was with interest that I read today of the soldier who confronted Cameron in what should have been a relatively easy meet-the-public format for him on his home turf in Witney.  The man said that he had spoken to him when years ago, when he had recently left the army having served in Kosovo. He had nowhere to live, a pregnant wife, and needed help. So he spoke to Cameron who promised to help him, and gave him his card. As the man told him yesterday, he made around 30 phone calls to Cameron, and not one was returned.

Not one. This betrays a contempt of his consituent which entirely undermines his desperate attempts to appear as a friend of the people. And if he can’t follow through on one simple promise to one voter as an MP, what hope is there of anything more elaborate being followed through on?

Reason #5: he is demonstrably unreliable – at worst a bare-faced liar, at best an insincere PR man.

A man is known by the company he keeps. Part 1.

We are aware that party leaders have to surround themselves with Malcolm Tucker characters to perform some of the more unsavoury tasks which would taint their carefully coiffed images. Mandelson’s and Campbell’s time in office with Labour has come to epitomise this highly intelligent, ruthless and predatory behaviour.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Conservative Party appointed Andy Coulson as Director of Communications in 2007.  Cameron may say he’s happy to allow Coulson a second chance, but given the grave nature of the things he’s done, it seems surprising that he’s at the heart of the party which likes to paint itself as the squeaky clean alternative in this election.

Just to recap – Coulson was editor of News of the World  from 2003 to 2007, during which period two thirds of the reporters who worked there commissioned the services of Steve Whittamore. Whittamore, who was jailed in 2005 for offences committed under the Data Protection Act, specialised in getting information out of confidential databases at banks and phone companies, as well as government departments including the national police computer and the HM Revenue and Customs database. Coulson resigned, which ensured that the Press Complaints Commission investigation was curtailed, which in turn ensured that Rupert Murdoch didn’t have to be questioned. When further questioned by a parliamentary Select Committee, he made the incredible claim not to have even heard of Steve Whittamore,

Between them, private investigators working for the News of the World, including Steve Whittamore and the better known Glenn Mulcaire, received hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from the paper under Coulson’s editorship. Mulcaire was a private investigator who hacked the phones of members and staff of the royal family for the NOTW’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman. And despite the widespread use of these journalistic sources, despite the huge amounts of money involved, Coulson had the audacity to deny any knowledge. This makes him either a liar or a very stupid man – able to be duped on a large scale. As we have to assume that Cameron would not hire someone he thought was stupid, he must know that he was perjuring himself, and be happy with the moral implications of this.

The footnote to this story is that both Goodman and Mulcaire have been paid cash sums by NOTW, and are thought to have signed confidentiality agreements. The two people who have sued over the extensive phone tapping which the paper carried out – Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballer Association, and publicist Max Clifford, have had their cases settled out of court, both of them receiving very generous damages on condition that the evidence is kept secret.  Neither of these actions on the part of NOTW look like the actions of an innocent party.

The other thing for which Coulson is notorious is that he was found to be responsible for a culture of bullying by an employment tribunal last November. Ex-NOTW sports reporter Matt Driscoll was paid almost £800,000 for unfair dismissal – the highest ever payout of its kind in media history.

However, perhaps Cameron’s assertion that everyone deserves a second chance just shows a streak of humanity. Strange then that he did not dismiss the bullying allegations against Gordon Brown with the same forgiving attitude. Instead he called for a full enquiry, stating “These are very serious matters … I’m sure that No 10 and the civil service in some way will want to have some sort of inquiry to get to the bottom of what has happened here.” He said this on the day that the Tory party’s old friend Christine Pratt of the so-called “National Bullying Helpline” had actually admitted that the complaints she’d claimed she’d received about Brown were actually not about him at all.

Reason #4: his Director of Communications presided over a newspaper which broke the law on a daily basis, and has been found to be responsible for bullying.

This may seem a flimsy reason. But watch the video and you’ll see why it isn’t. He’s right about everything he says, and he says it in a much cleverer and funnier way than I could.

And here’s the behind-the-scenes video.

Reason #3: Eddie Izzard says not to.

The Tories hate gays.  OK, of course not all Tories, and not all gays.  But while David Cameron has been busy trying to pack his rebranded party with black, gay and female MPs, papering over the cracks isn’t working for the Tories. In the last couple of days headlines which follow the shocking Grayling B&B comments expose the party as hypocritical – parading minority members to present a modern face to the public while the reality is very different.

Yesterday, two high profile gay members of the Conservative Party defected to Labour, disappointed by the Tories.  One of them, David Heathcote, was a prominent Tory campaigner in Huddersfield (just up the road from where I live). Speaking in the Huddersfield Examiner today, he says that he feels let down over the Grayling affair, as “None of the senior party leaders came out to speak against Chris Grayling, even though his comments were contrary to party policy”.

More damaging to the Tories, though, is Anastasia Beaumont-Bott’s defection. She is the former head of David Cameron’s gay campaign, and now says that “the ideals David Cameron put forward… a Conservative party which believes in change … is  an elaborately executed, highly marketed deception”.  Beaumont-Bott says she was bullied as a teenager, called abusive names like “Dyke. Lezzer. Freak.” She therefore decided she would make a stand against discrimination, but found that when she joined the Tories, other members made constant references to her sexuality. Her complaints about discrimination and smears were ignored within the party.

Her full statement can be read in The Mirror.  One thing she mentions is David Cameron’s voting record, and this is where the most chilling facts are found. Cameron has voted against lesbian IVF, and gay adoption, as well as famously voting against the repeal of section 28 (which bans the promotion of homosexuality in schools) as recently as 2003.

And it is this voting record which really shows the Tories for what they are. Grayling’s statements can be painted as an individual opinion, the defection of two public party members can be painted as a “betrayal” of the Conservative Party, but not even the slickest PR machine can hide the fact that the Tories have consistently voted against gay rights. I found this wonderful chart from informationisbeautiful.net on The Guardian’s website today (I can’t find the original on the creator’s site), which shows how the cabinet and shadow cabinet respectively voted on recent gay rights issues. [Click to enlarge.]

And if this doesn’t highlight the difference clearly enough, mygayvote.co.uk shows that the Tories have only provided an astoundingly low average of 27% support for gay rights issues in parliament, compared to a more respectable 97% from Labour, and 96% from the Lib Dems.

Reason #2: The Tories consistently vote against gay rights.