A year ago today, Liz Truss signed a post-Brexit trade deal with Japan, and subsequently told Parliament it delivered ‘higher’ benefits than our previous deal via the EU. Now I can reveal her officials advised her on how to correct that false claim, something she never did. (1/5)
The trouble started on 19th November, when I asked her in the Commons simply to quantify in pounds or percentages the difference between the benefits for the British economy of the UK-Japan deal versus the EU-Japan deal. This is how the end of those exchanges played out. (2/5) 
The next day, I wrote to Truss challenging the claim she’d made about the UK-Japan deal delivering ‘higher’ growth in UK exports than the EU-Japan deal, and asking her again to provide the figures to back up her claims. That letter caused quite a stir inside DIT. (3/5)
Despite the heavy redactions, these internal DIT emails show that officials prepared ‘procedural options’ on how to make a correction to Hansard, or clarify the record through a Written Ministerial Statement. If Truss had told the truth, why were those options necessary? (4/5)
Despite the advice, Truss left the record uncorrected. Fortunately, I exposed her false claims myself the following week. But this is just what the government does time after time: blatant lies with no consequences and still no correction. It's shameless.
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