Conservative Party Deputy Chairman Lee Anderson has described two senior Home Office officials who were unable to answer questions put to them by MPs as ‘Laurel and Hardy in colour’.
And Mr Anderson told GB News viewers if they were working for him, ‘they’d be out in the car park’.
Describing the scenes which unfolded during a committee hearing he told Patrick Christys: “We had two hours of Laurel and Hardy in colour. They were shuffling their papers around, scratching their heads, didn’t have a clue and I don’t think in the whole two hour session they answered one single question correctly.
“It was always, ‘we’re going to write to you, we don’t have that information on hand’ yet they had two assistants behind them with their laptop who could have got that information. It was shocking. It was an insult to the Home Affairs committee.
“When you go to meet MPs at the committee, you should know your brief; you should have the facts, the figures, you should do your homework. It was amateurish and awful and quite frankly they should be ashamed of themselves.
“It looks like a) – they don’t know their brief b) – they’re not bothered.
“Bear in mind these meetings are streamed live so anyone on this planet can watch that meeting live.
“They’re Home Office officials on massive salaries and they can’t even answer a question. They were simple questions.
“If I run a private business and I had two employees like that they’d probably be working out in the car park.
“On that performance today it was a couple of YTS (youth training scheme) trainees, 30 years ago on their first day at work. They didn’t have a clue. They’d got their heads up their backside.
“One of them has a knighthood for services to – I don’t know what.”
Meanwhile Mr Anderson also defended an idea – first raised last week – about sending unprocessed migrants to the Orkney’s. The idea prompted criticism including fromt the region’s local MP Alastair Carmichael
Standing by his idea, Mr Anderson said:
“I don’t know what’s bad with the Orkneys. My dad served there with an exemplary military career back in the day.
“It’s a long way away but if Birmingham, if Nottingham, if Derby, if Leicester, if Sheffield are good enough to send illegal migrants to then what’s wrong with the Orkneys or any other island or any part of the great British Isles?
“I know what the problem is: people like [Alastair Carmichael] – he doesn’t want them there. He’s quite happy to have illegal migrants in the towns and villages around where we are, but it’s in your own backyard, despite bleating on all the time about how we should accept more, they don’t want them in their own back yard.”
