Grant Shapps has been left embarrassed after the BBC was forced to issue a correction over his claim that Gordon Brown created 50 new peers when he resigned as prime minister.
The energy secretary made his comments amid the row over Boris Johnson’s decision to reward his allies with gongs.
They included seven new members of the House of Lords and a knighthood for Jacob Rees-Mogg.
On the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show this morning, Shapps tried to defend the system by suggesting former Labour PM Brown had also used it to hand peerages to dozens of his supporters.
He said: “I think Gordon Brown in his resigntion list appointed 50 new peers - 50 new people to the House of Lords. We’ve seen a very small number from this current list.”
In actual fact, Brown did not issue a resignation honours list at all.
Instead, there was a cross-party “dissolution list” to mark the end of the 2005-2010 parliament, which created 29 Labour peers, 16 Tories, nine Lib Dems and one from the DUP.
Shapps’s comments were not corrected when he said them, but Kuenssberg did issue a clarification 20 minutes later.
She said: “For all of you political pub quiz champions out there, you might have noticed already that Grant Shapps said that Gordon Brown had a resignation honours list.
“In fact, he had a dissolution honours list which actually gave rewards to members of all political parties.”
A Labour source said: “You can tell the Tories are in trouble when Grant Shapps gets sent out on the airwaves, but today was a new low as he lied about Gordon Brown producing a resignation honours list.
“Desperate stuff from a totally bankrupt Conservative Party.”