Does Policing Minister Agree With Boris Johnson's "Spaffed" Comments
14 March 2019, 10:43
Policing Minister Nick Hurd told Boris Johnson that he was wrong to say that police budgets spent on historical child abuse is "spaffed up the wall".
The former Foreign Secretary made the controversial comments yesterday on LBC when he was asked about knife crime in London.
He told Nick Ferrari: "I think an awful lot of money, an awful lot of police time, now goes into these historic offences and all this malarkey and you know £60million I saw has been spaffed up the wall on some investigation into historic child abuse?"
That caused a lot of controversy, with a number of MPs writing to the Chief Whip to ask him to act on Mr Johnson's words.
Nick asked the Policing Minister if he agreed and he responded: "Spaffed is a new word for me, I don't really know what it means."
Nick warned him not to look it up, saying: "I looked it up this morning, you're not going to like it."
Mr Hurd continued: "I share a lot of the reservations that you and listeners have expressed about specific individual historic child abuse cases and how they have been handled.
"Speaking as Policing Minister, I'm very very clear that the top priority is serious violence and knife crime.
"But I don't want it to be a choice. My priority is to get more resources into a police system that is too stretched.
"I don't want to send any signal to the police that the government doesn't want them to investigate child sex abuse."
Watch the clip at the top of the page.
