By Neil Doyle
GRANT Shapps says his colleague Sir Gavin Williamson was wrong to send text messages threatening to reveal details about a Conservative MP’s private life when he was chief whip.
Mr Shapps, the UK business secretary, said Mr Williamson should not have sent the messages to Wendy Morton, who was chief whip under Liz Truss’s brief prime ministership. The texts were revealed over the weekend to include angry remonstrations about not being invited to the Queen’s funeral and warnings that “there is a price for everything”.
Speaking this morning on GB News, Mr Shapps said: “Well, it’s not very edifying, I agree with you, to see that exchange. We don’t know whether we’ve seen the whole exchange or not. That’s why there’s a process ongoing looking into it now. Gavin Williamson was wrong to send those messages…and he has apologised and this process will get to the bottom of it all because we don’t know if we’ve got the full picture yet, but that’s what this process will show us.”
Meanwhile Mr Shapps also refused to say if the Government will keep its promise on maintaining the triple lock on pensions.
When pressed on Breakfast with Isabel Webster and Stephen Dixon he said: “You only have to wait till the 17th which is the Autumn Statement. I think everyone recognises that, battered by Covid and with a war in Ukraine, that freedom isn’t free, and there is a cost to having a free society and being on the side of of the righteous. We won’t stand by and watch a European country be invaded.
Defending his party’s record, Mr Shapps said: “The British government has put billions of pounds into supporting people to keep the electricity and the gas bills as low as possible this winter. And that support is ongoing.
“It doesn’t mean it’s not painful in the process. And to the wider question, look, there needs to be global agreement. on making sure we don’t end up in a position where the world suffers because of climate change in a way that would make living on this planet impossible for so many of us.
“So there are many challenges. Sometimes you have to tackle more than one at the same time. I’m afraid that that is the position the world finds itself in.”
On the Government’s green economy plan, he said: “The world is coming together and agreeing how to take it forward. The biggest challenge we all face, which is that we don’t talk about climate change. It has impacts on all of us.
“So it’s important we sort that out and globally there needs to be an agreement to do that. It wouldn’t be the United Kingdom on our own paying for that, but we were one of the first world first countries in the world to industrialise.
“As Business Secretary, I’m also in charge of energy and climate, and it is actually really important that we have that energy independence.
“We need to have that independence and we’re lucky in this country to have a better mix than probably any other European country. We’ve got the world’s most wind power, for example, offshore, particularly around our coasts.
“That mix is really important and we don’t want to be reliant on other countries, whether that’s Russia or China. We want a proper mix.”
