Esther McVey branded ‘serial liar’ after euro warning on Twitter

Former Tory minister forced to delete post claiming all EU members have to adopt the European currency after 2020

Esther McVey
Esther McVey quit as work and pensions secretary in November
(Image credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Former Tory minister Esther McVey has been branded a “serial liar” after tweeting untrue claims about the EU.

The Tory Brexiteer approvingly quoted an opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph from 2014 in which Brexit-supporting economist Andrew Lilico suggested “at some point, perhaps shortly after 2020, with the Eurozone constituted as a confederate Single European State and wanting to use the institution of the EU as its institutions […] the residual nugatory non-Eurozone EU will have to be wound up.”

Lilico suggested that it “seems highly unlikely” that there would be any non-euro members of the EU by 2020, “given the existential economic necessity of the Eurozone forming into a deeper political union”.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In a tweet on Sunday that referred to the Telegraph article, McVey wrote: “Are the public aware of this? And the many other things the EU has planned for its member states after 2020? #trust #WatchOut.”

Her post attracted more than 3,000 replies before she deleted it, “most of them as scathing as you would expect”, says Politico’s Jack Blanchard.

See more
See more

Some Twitter users pointed to a tweet posted by McVey hours before she made the EU claim that decried the lack of trust in British politicians.

See more

McVey later appeared to concede that her tweet had caused something of a stir, but then shifted the parameters of her argument.

See more
See more

In the wake of the incident, the former work and pensions secretary’s Wikipedia page was changed to include the phrase “provable serial liar” in her biography.

It is not the first time that McVey has been accused of repeating unproven information.

In July last year, National Audit Office (NAO) boss Sir Amyas Morse took what The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee described as the “extraordinary step” of publishing a letter of reprimand sent to McVey when she was in charge of the Department for Work and Pensions. In the letter, Morse claimed that she had made a series of misleading statements to the Commons in which she misrepresented the views of the NAO.

McVey later apologised to the House for “inadvertently misleading” MPs on the issue, insisting it was a “mistake”.

Despite calls for her resignation in the wake of the letter, McVey hung on until November, when she resigned over Theresa May’s draft Brexit deal. McVey said the deal “does not honour the result of the referendum” and she “could not look [her] constituents in the eye” over the plans.

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.