A Labour minister was grilled about past criticism of Donald Trump in an awkward exchange with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
Treasury minister Darren Jones insisted he did not remember branding the US president-elect “repugnant” in a 2016 social media post.
Pressed on if he still thinks Donald Trump is “repugnant”, Mr Jones told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “Did I say that?
“Do you want to show me? Where is it? I don’t know where that’s from, do you want to show me.”
The host then read the quote which said: “In my view with the US election being so close with a Republican candidate as repugnant as Donald Trump spells a much longer-term problem for the centre left of politics.”
Mr Jones said: “Well look, it’s no surprise that as a Labour Party politician I support Labour sister parties such as the Democrats.
“All of us have commented on politics in the past but what’s very clear is that president-elect Trump won very decisively in the US.
“He has got a mandate from the American people to lead them from the inauguration in January and as a government we totally respect that and we look forward to working with him and his administration.”
The Treasury minister dismissed calls for Labour MPs to apologise of previous comments.
Mr Jones is one of a series of high-profile Labour figures who have come under pressure over past criticism of Mr Trump following his stunning US election victory last week.
Sir Keir Starmer was left scrambling to congratulate the Republican having declared himself in 2021 to be “anti-Trump but pro-American”.
Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary David Lammy dismissed his past comments about Mr Trump as “old news”.
Mr Lammy branded the 78-year-old as a “racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser” in 2017.
A year later, the Tottenham MP wrote in Time magazine that he would be protesting against the then-government’s “capitulation to this tyrant in a toupee”, in reference to Mr Trump’s first official visit to the UK.
He wrote: “Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath, he is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long.”
