Oh dear. It seems that Ed Davey – the most righteous man in all of parliament – has got it wrong again. He and his party must have thought it a terrific wheeze when they announced that they would today be pushing for documents on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as a UK trade envoy to be released, following his arrest last week. But poor old Sir Ed had a torrid time on the morning media round, given his historic support for Andrew’s position when he was a business minister in the Coalition government. Whoops!
Invited on to the Today programme, host Nick Robinson pressed Sir Ed on his 2011 comments that Andrew was doing an ‘excellent job’ as trade envoy and dismissed concerns around him at the time as ‘innuendo’. The Lib Dem leader duly grovelled, saying: ‘First of all can I apologise to all those victims of Epstein who may have read those words and been upset by them. I really regret them.’ He then admitted that he ‘wasn’t really over the brief’ adding ‘no MP mentioned Epstein in that debate and I think that tells a tale about how Parliament and MPs don’t hold the Royal Family, didn’t hold [the former] Prince Andrew in that really privileged position, properly to account’. Even sainted Sir Ed?
Sadly for the Lib Dem leader, his media round did not get any better from that moment. On Good Morning Britain, it was left to Ed Balls – host and husband of Yvette Cooper – to take the moral high ground, declaring:
I just wonder whether you’ve got the tone right… in your motion today, you say the Liberal Democrats are moving a binding motion to force the government to come clean, as though this government hasn’t come clean about things which were happening while you and I were both ministers. I mean, isn’t it right just to say that the whole of politics, the whole of government, in retrospect, got him wrong and playing party politics on behalf of Liberal Democrats.
Sir Ed was duly left spluttering. Much to the joy of many Labour and Tory politicians tired of Lib Dem lectures on ethics…
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