Dear oh dear. It’s never a good look to go onto the airwaves to boast about your department’s new infrastructure fund to then, er, promptly forget the details of the project you’re funding. The unlucky minister who found herself in this position today was the Treasury’s Emma Reynolds, who appeared to forget both exactly where the new Lower Thames Crossing road is and how much the total bill will come to. Talk about a car crash, eh?
Speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari this morning, Reynolds was first quizzed on where exactly the new road from Essex to Kent would start and end. ‘Just remind us where the new crossing is, where it takes off and where it lands,’ the veteran presenter quizzed his interviewee. ‘Eh, well, erm…’ Reynolds began rather unpromisingly, before going on: ‘It’s… You’ll forgive me, I can’t recall the exact landing zone.’ And despite her attempts to waffle on about other details of the project, Reynolds was not allowed to get off scot-free. ‘You don’t actually know where it takes off from and where it lands, do you?’ Ferrari hit back scathingly. Ouch.
And never mind the geography – Reynolds also confused the ‘Dartford tunnel’ with Dartmouth, a town in Devon – the Treasury minister wasn’t even on top of the numbers either. Despite being on air to announce the ‘substantial’ injection of funding going towards the Lower Thames Crossing project, she couldn’t quite specify just how much the new road would cost. She told Ferrari rather vaguely that it would be ‘quite a lot of money’ and ‘several billion pounds’. When her host reminded her the correct answer was actually £10 billion, she told him rather unconvincingly: ‘I’m here to talk about the broader infrastructure plan as well that we will be launching later this week.’ Good heavens…
Watch the clip here:
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