Former first minister Alex Salmond has insisted he has no regrets about joking that he would be writing the next Labour Party budget.
He said he had merely been “poking fun” with the remark as he criticised David Cameron for his “po-faced” response to it.
The Prime Minister had sent a tweet showing video footage, apparently filmed at an SNP meeting on April 13, featuring Mr Salmond saying he had heard a Labour spokesman say that Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy would not be writing the party’s budget.
To laughter from activists, Mr Salmond – who is standing for election as MP for Gordon on May 7 – continued: “I knew that already because I’m writing the Labour Party budget.”
Mr Cameron told his Twitter followers: “This footage will shock you: Alex Salmond laughs and boasts he’ll write Labour’s budget. Vote Conservative to stop it.”
The Conservative leader has repeatedly warned that a post-election deal between Labour and the SNP would result in a “coalition of chaos”.
Mr Salmond, however, argued that no-one could take his comments as anything other than a joke.
When asked by BBC Radio Scotland if he regretted making the remarks, the former SNP leader said: “Not in the slightest.”
He told the Good Morning Scotland programme: “It was a public meeting at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, the Gaelic college in Skye, it was on the day that Jim Murphy was being slapped down by his own party who said the Scottish leader wouldn’t be writing the Labour Party budget, because Jim Murphy had been claiming wrongly that Labour didn’t plan on cuts, which they do.
“I was making fun, poking fun, at the Tory claim that I’d be writing the Labour Party’s budget. It was a joke, it was taken as a joke and people saw it as that.
“Nobody could possibly see it as anything else.”
He added: “Of course the difference is that people laugh at my jokes, as far as David Cameron and his po-faced response, they laugh at his Cabinet ministers.”