The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg cornered a minister on Sunday when she reminded him of his own public attacks on president-elect Donald Trump.
Speaking to the chief secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, the presenter asked: “Do you still think that Donald Trump is repugnant?”
Jones replied: “Did I say that?”
“You wrote that a few years ago, it’s still online,” the presenter said.
“Do you want to show me? Where is it?” Jones said. “I don’t know where that’s from! Do you want to show me?”
Kuenssberg pointed out he wrote it online, adding: “I can read you the quote. You said, ‘In my view, with the US election being so close with a Republican candidate as repugnant as Donald Trump, spells a much longer problem for the centre-left.’”
Jones asked when that was even written, to which Kuenssberg confirmed it was published in 2016.
The presenter then added: “In 2022, you said: ‘Maybe Donald Trump, Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson can get together and reminisce about the failures of divisive right-wing populism’.”
Jones did not reply directly to those remarks, but said: “It’s no surprise that as a Labour Party politician, I support Labour sister parties such as the Democrats.
“All of us have commented on politics in the past, but what’s very clear is that president-elect Trump won very decisively in the US – he won the electorate college, the popular vote, the house of Senate, the house of Reps.
“He has got a mandate from the American people to lead them from the inauguration in January and as a government we obviously totally respect that, and we look forward to working with him.”
Jones also rejected Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s suggestion that Labour should apologise for their former criticisms towards Trump before his second administration beings.
He said: “I don’t think we should be getting into that – you might want to ask Kemi Badenoch about the many things she has said in the past and whether she wants to go through them, line by line.
“What’s important is about how you conduct yourself in government.”
Labour have been toeing a fine line in recent months, with many members of the cabinet – including Keir Starmer – publicly slamming the Republican at some point over the last eight years.
Foreign secretary David Lammy has also tried to dismiss his own previous attacks on the incoming US president over the last week.
