We haven’t seen much of Andrew Mitchell since his recent promotion and today was perhaps a reminder why. For more than ten years, the onetime Chief Whip languished on the backbenches post-plebgate, until last October Sunak appointed him Minister of State for Development and Africa. It was Mitchell’s turn to do the government media round today but it proved to be a pretty tricky outing for the Old Rugbeian.
His trenchant criticisms of Boris Johnson’s policies came back to haunt him today when Mitchell was asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about his punchy past statements on the decision to cut Britain’s aid budget from 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income. Mitchell claimed that ‘collective responsibility fortunately is not retrospective’ before insisting that his job now is to ‘try and make the system work as well as possible’ and that the 0.7 figure’s return ‘cannot come soon enough.’
That interview was tricky enough for Mitchell but he really came unstuck later on Andrew Neil’s Channel 4 show.
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