Priti Patel gets called out by Piers Morgan in ‘excruciating’ GMB interview

Another day, another example of Piers Morgan running rings around a Conservative MP who is lost for words when attempting to explain their misteps. 

This time it falls to the home secretary Priti Patel who was on Good Morning Britain to answer questions about the 400,000 criminal records that have been reportedly wiped from police databases. The accident has been put down to "human error" and "defective code" and Patel has even been accused of dodging parliament over the fiasco. She denies this. 

However, there was nowhere for the Tory minister to hide on Wednesday morning as she was left squirming over the tough and unrelenting questions that were being thrown at her by Morgan. 

Struggling to find the answers to the questions, Patel claimed that the records might not have been ‘lost’ but could be elsewhere within the police’s system. She said, “First of all let me explain the context in which this has happened… this is a coding error that has led to a number of records… that have potentially been lost, we don’t know primarily because there are multiple across multiple systems… currently we are pushing through new data code to wash through that… we are working night and day with technicians.”

Continuing to be unimpressed with her answers Morgan went as far to ask her if she would resign if they fail to retrieve the records. Patel said in response, “It’s our imperative and my imperative as well, as home secretary to keep the public safe and find this data.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Patel was quizzed on the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the temporary lifting of restrictions over Christmas and the vague guidelines which many feel have led to the recent spikes in Covid cases.

Patel tried to claim that they never encouraged people to mix with their family which prompted co-host Susanna Reid to scorn the minister for such a claim. The presenter said, "You allowed them to do it under the rules. You can't say on one hand we allowed people to do it and on the other hand, we told people not to. It's exactly what we knew you were going to do. You were going to allow people to do it and mix and in January you were gonna blame the people who did for what happened. It was the government who had the control to change that!"

Covid cases in the UK reached a record daily high of 1,610 on Tuesday. Recent data has shown that the UK has the highest death rate in the world right now with an average of 935 deaths being recorded on a daily basis.

More: How will the pandemic and the government's actions impact our livelihoods in 2021?