Tobias Ellwood admits the Conservatives need to "provide more clarity" on their claims

3 December 2019, 20:06

Tobias Ellwood admitted that the Conservatives need to "provide more clarity" on their claims and that he is "concerned", after this caller confronts him on Boris Johnson's "lies."

The caller Steve said Tobias Ellwood seemed like an honourable man, and asked: "How do you feel about this Trump style of campaigning - just telling repeated lies over and over and over again? Especially by your leader."

Steve gave examples of Boris Johnson's "lies" including his claims in the Andrew Marr interview that Parliament blocked the Queen's speech "whilst they didn't".

"These lies are not mistakes, they're not misspeaks, they are a deliberate attempt to mislead the electorate," Steve said, "how do you feel about that?"

When Mr Ellwood began saying they were errors, Steve expressly said they are not errors and confronted the Tory candidate his party's claim to build 40 new hospitals.

"There is an intention to build six new hospitals, the rest of them are refurbishments of existing hospitals - there aren't suddenly going to be an extra 40 new hospitals in the UK," said Steve.

Mr Ellwood said, "All these details about the number of hospitals will actually come to a fore, I agree with you that we perhaps provide a clarity. The nursing one is another example whereby we want to increase the number of nurses and we should make it clear that that means we want to retain nurses that might be leaving.

He continued that he was "concerned" about the Conservatives' fact check Twitter handle - this was after they rebranded one of their official party accounts to make it look like a service factchecking Labour during ITV's leader's debate.

He admitted that the problem with the Prime Minister saying that Parliament blocked the Queen's speech was "they'd lost so many votes that he said something that was entirely incorrect."

Steve asked whether Boris Johnson lies or whether he is "completely incompetent".

Eddie asked: "Would you concede that there have been times when your own party leader has not been completely candid? He has said things which he knows to be completely untrue?"

"I think it's fair to say that every effort must be made to avoid that and we need to move forward from that," he said, "any leader choosing to do that will get caught out."

Steve said about Tobias Ellwood that he "probably is admitting that the leader of the Conservative party, and from other parties, are telling out and out lies. As the electorate I really don't want to hear that."

The Tory candidate said that his experience of this general election "does feel very very different" due to the impact of social media.

Eddie pointed out that it "starts with what comes out of their mouths", despite media potentially distorting politicians' messages.

"Ultimately all of us are human," said Mr Ellwood and commented that the Andrew Marr interview did not benefit anyone as the Prime Minister was unable to elaborate on any of his points.

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