Cameron taunts Brown after election pull-out ... but admits Tories would have lost anyway

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The Tory leader's remarks are in stark contrast to boasts last year that they wanted the General Election to go ahead because they would win it.

Mr Cameron's comments come in a BBC documentary by former Tory Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo.

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Bring it on: Mr Cameron admitted the Tories probably would have lost an autumn election

In a fevered political atmosphere last autumn, Labour's deliberate stoking up of Election speculation was met by Tory challenges of "bring it on".

But Mr Cameron tells Mr Portillo: "An October Election would have been a very tough ask for me and the Conservative Party.

"It would have been a very tough fight."

And asked if defeat at the next Election, when it comes, could cause a split in the party between traditionalist Thatcherites and Mr Cameron's so-called Tory modernisers, he replies: "There are certain questions starting with 'if' that I never answer - and that's one of them."

In the documentary, entitled Portillo On Thatcher - The Lady's Not For Spurning, which is to be screened on BBC4 a week tomorrow, Mr Cameron also answers criticism that he has betrayed Mrs Thatcher's legacy.

He says: "Mrs Thatcher was the future. She said to Britain, at the end of the Seventies, that our best days were not behind us.

"It was a modernising, futuristic message and we need to do the same thing in very different circumstances."