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  1. Business
  2. Economics
10 July 2012

Tory demand for an Osborne apology is growing

Tory MP Andrea Leadsom says the Chancellor "should apologise" for his attack on Balls.

By George Eaton

The increasingly impressive Conservative MP Andrea Leadsom won’t have done her career prospects any good with her call for George Osborne to “apologise” to Ed Balls but she has won the respect of Labour MPs as well as a sizeable number of Tories.

Asked by Radio 4’s The World Tonight whether Osborne should apologise to Balls after Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker said no ministers asked him to “lean on” Barclays over Libor rates, Leadsom said:

Yes I do. I mean I think obviously he made a mistake and I think he should apologise.

She added:

I think it was a very valid discussion at the time about who knew what and that’s now been completely squashed by Paul Tucker and that is a valid conversation to have had, and now at a personal level he probably would want to apologise.

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But Osborne and his aides are refusing to back down. A friend of the Chancellor tells the Telegraph’s James Kirkup that Osborne’s suggestion was never that Labour ministers had lent on the Bank of England, rather that they had influenced the banks directly. That may or may not be the case, but one notes that Osborne has yet to supply any evidence to support his account. Nor has he even laid out the alleged “questions” Balls needs to answer.  As one Tory MP observed last week, “Before we went into the chamber on Thursday, George’s people were saying ‘Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. George is going to get Ed Balls’. They were indicating that there was a silver bullet that was going to kill him. It was never fired.

Challenged on the Today programme to defend Osborne, William Hague insisted that “there remain questions to answer” and that there was “no reason” for him to apologise. But as the Foreign Secretary’s voice quivered one could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Osborne’s dramatic assertion that Labour ministers were “clearly involved” in the rate-rigging scandal has become the banal claim that they have “questions” to answer at the forthcoming parliamentary inquiry. Whether or not the Chancellor apologises, he has blinked first in this duel.

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