Lucy Powell MP: Tories must kick out EDL deal candidate

THE GENERAL ELECTION campaign isn't even officially underway, yet already David Cameron and the Tories are in deep disarray.  From the top down, just days before the start of the campaign, they are in a complete mess.

Their party leader is running  scared from a head-to-head TV debate with Ed Miliband and no day goes by without their party chairman having more of his dodgy business practices humiliatingly exposed.

Now we learn that one of their key-seat candidates colluded with the far-right English Defence League in an extraordinary attempt to stage a fake race-hate march - so that he could then get the "credit" when it was called off.

A deeply worrying story - and, rightly, Afzal Amin has been suspended as the Tory candidate for Dudley North. But David Cameron and Grant Shapps must now go further and kick him out of the Conservative Party itself.

They must surely be able to find the time to do so - even though they are each battling their own crises.

Today we learn Grant Shapps is facing legal action from the constituent he disgracefully bullied - using threats from solicitors - into publishing a falsehood regarding Shapps's use of his Michael Green alter ego.

We have also read toe-curling details of the Shapps/Green sales pitch, in which he promised clients they could get "stinking, filthy rich" and bragged about owning a car with a fridge in it.

David Cameron, meanwhile, has shown his true colours by ducking out of a head-to-head TV debate with Ed. He has even ordered his craven deputy, Nick Clegg, to be absent from one debate three weeks before polling day because he doesn't want to be the only party leader who doesn't show up.

David Cameron likes to throw around jibes about leadership - but he is showing cowardice in the face of a proper challenge.

He and Grant Shapps are floundering badly while Labour is carrying on with millions of conversations, telling people about our better plan for Britain's future.

Labour is displaying competence, while all we see from David Cameron, Grant Shapps and the Tories is chaos.

As Ed Miliband writes in today's Sunday Mirror, the country will only succeed when we all succeed.  The government Ed leads will bring hope, not the hopelessness we are seeing today from the Tories.