Priti Patel's husband blamed the homelessness crisis on the government earlier this year, it has emerged.
But last night the Home Secretary, when questioned about the poverty rate in Barrow, Cumbria, tried to deflect blame away from the Tories who have now been in power for nine years.
When told that four in 10 children in parts of Barrow are born into poverty, she told BBC North West Tonight: “Well it’s appalling.
"But of course everybody, and it’s not just people in Westminster, it’s not just at a national level it’s at a local level.”
Responding to the suggestion that nine years of Tory rule were responsible, she said: “Well it’s not the Government though is it?
“Everybody just says it’s the Government as if it’s this sort of like bland blob that you know, you can just go and blame.”
But, according to the Bexley Times , speaking in April councillor Alex Sawyer, who is married to Mrs Patel, said of homelessness: “I work with the relevant officers and they work with those in the community to ensure as few of those people as possible fall into that trap.
“I'm not immune to the fact that successive governments have made a pig's ear of the issue of homelessness and house buildings.
“It is a stain on the character of the fifth largest economy on earth that we have got this issue so spectacularly wrong.
“The issue of homelessness is top of my agenda, not because of financial costs, but because of the sheer human costs of the wasted lives because of the number of lives lost to homelessness."
Priti Patel was made Home Secretary in July by Boris Johnson .
In August 2017 Mrs Patel, the MP for Witham, then the international development secretary, stopped employing her husband after being criticised for paying him tens of thousands of pounds to run her office while he held two other jobs.
Her arrogant response to questions about the Tory record come as former chancellor George Osborne, one of chief champions of austerity, brazenly launched a newspaper campaign to tackle homelessness.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said: "Priti Patel's claims in this video are yet another example of the Tory Government’s cruelty.
"Local Government has suffered enormously from vicious Tory cuts. Of course we can blame the Tory Government for poverty."
