Jacob Rees-Mogg has infuriated Twitter once again after his broadcasting round on Wednesday.
The business secretary was trying to defend the current state of the UK economy shortly after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed we are on the brink of a recession.
According to the ONS data, the UK economy shrank unexpectedly by 0.3% in August, due to a range of factors including the cost of living crisis, the war in Ukraine and inflation reducing the amount people spend.
The government’s disastrous mini-budget announced in September is only exacerbate the economic decline, too.
But Rees-Mogg was pretty nonplussed by these developments on the broadcast rounds.
Instead, he accused the BBC of breaching its impartiality rules after a presenter asked how the government would respond to the economic chaos.
He told the Today programme: “I think jumping to conclusions about causality is not meeting the BBC’s requirement for impartiality. It is a commentary rather than a factual question.”
He also claimed instability in pension funds was “not necessarily” related to the mini-budget, and he played down the Bank of England’s emergency interventions to stabilise the economy.
He also told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that the government was not to blame for the sudden decline in the market days after the mini-budget was announced.
Rees-Mogg said: “I would point to the day before, when the monetary policy committee did not put up interest rates as much as the Federal Reserve had. And that was the more profound effect on markets.
That’s an actual price and that was a widening of the differential between the benchmark which is effectively the US, the low-risk investment and the UK.”
Twitter did not make much of any of these answers.