During Thursday’s Question Time, members of the audience in Loughborough, Leicestershire, asked Conservative MP Joe Robertson if he would apologise for the party’s errors amid the Covid pandemic
Josh Babarinde, of the Liberal Democrats, took a Tory MP to task last night(Image: BBC Question Time)
The Question Time audience last night applauded panellists who skewered a Conservative MP for his party’s errors made during the Covid pandemic.
Two people in the crowd in Loughborough, Leicestershire, asked Tory MP Joe Robertson if he would apologise for mistakes the Conservative Party made in the handling of the pandemic. It emerged earlier on Thursday Boris Johnson’s late lockdowns killed thousands of people, and the Inquiry chair Baroness Heather Hallett said the Partygate-PM and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings presided over a “toxic culture”.
Although Mr Robertson, MP for Isle of Wight East, wasn’t part of the government then, he faced the music on Question Time last night. Fellow panellist Josh Babarinde, MP for Eastbourne since 2024, accused Mr Robertson of “fobbing a gentleman off” when the guest asked Mr Robertson to apologise for the errors.
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Joe Robertson, MP with the Conservative Party, was accused of ‘fobbing the UK off'(Image: BBC Question Time)
Mr Babarinde said: “Joe, you just fobbed that guy off in the audience who asked for an apology and, in doing so, you’ve fobbed off the whole country, who have been utterly let down by the way in which the Conservative government managed this situation. That is laid bare in this report, [it says] ‘toxic, sexist culture in Number 10 Downing Street.’
“I was out there vaccinating people. I trained with St John Ambulance. My partner, Connor, was out working in A&E, working with people on ventilator to try to combat this every single day in order to try to get our country through this… We were utterly let down and undermined by the government at every turn.
“Boris Johnson should be hauled into Downing Street for one last Downing Street press conference to apologise to the whole country, and he should be banned from holding public office ever again in of these failures he has brought upon our country.”
Zoe Lyons, a comedian from south Wales, was also angry with the Tories(Image: BBC Question Time)
The audience clapped 32-year-old Mr Babarinde, also a social entrepreneur, who had interjected after Mr Robertson rambled in answer to a direct question from a young man in the crowd.
He had said: “We saw, ourselves, the data coming of China and out of north Italy, with lots of people dying [of Covid] a day. Can you just say something, and say ‘sorry’ for all the lives that were lost during the pandemic?”
But Mr Robertson, who worked for charity Dementia UK as in in-house adviser before entering politics, did not apologise. Fioa Bruce, the show’s presenter, acknowledged the politician wasn’t in power at the time, but Mr Robertson incredibly still went on to state the inquiry’s report does not “call for an apology from the Conservatives”. He then flagged the rollout of the vaccination scheme, and the use of furlough, waffle which led to Mr Babarinde claiming he had fobbed off the man.
Comedian Zoe Lyons, also on the panel last night, had earlier blasted the government’s decisions during the pandemic. She said the nation’s “greatest fault” was having Mr Johnson in charge at the time, a dig which led to further applause from the audience.