Susanna Reid was not impressed with Michael Gove on Tuesday's Good Morning Britain when he accused her of 'myth making'.
The Minister for the Cabinet Office appeared on the ITV show to discuss the fact that 'Freedom Day' has been delayed by four weeks.
Asked if everything will really open up in July, Susanna asked Mr Gove: "Can you give us a promise that July 19th will be the end of it?" to which he simply replied: "Yes."
"None of us can predict the future with 100 per cent certainty, there could be something bizarre and unprecedented that occurs but on the basis of all the information we have, then we will have successfully protected such a large section of the population and of course children will be facing summer holidays and that brings the infection rate down, so we're as confident as confident can be about that date."
Susanna then steered the conversation towards the claims that the reason the UK is facing a growing number of cases is because "hundreds of infections were brought in from abroad in April".
"The fact of the matter is we were too late to shut out what was known back at the beginning of April as the India variant, weren't we?" the mum-of-three asked Mr Gove.
"No, I'd disagree with that Susanna.," he replied. "The first thing to say is we put India on the red list before we knew that the Delta variant was a variant under investigation, before we knew it was a variant of concern."
But Susanna, 50, argued that point and said the Government were late in doing so.
"The fact of the matter is, NHS Test and Trace March 25th to April 27th, showed that India had a positivity rate on arrivals of 5.1 per cent way more than Bangladesh with 3.7 per cent," the TV star said.
"Whether we’re going to quibble about the nature of the wording around the variant, the fact of the matter is, there was an issue with Covid positive travellers coming in from India but we didn’t shut the border until it was too late."
Mr Gove replied: “I think you’re mixing up a couple of things there, it’s understandable, you know because there’s a lot of myth making and propaganda."
Susanna then interjected: "I’m not myth making Mr Gove! I’m talking about the positivity rates when it comes to Covid of travellers coming from India, surely that’s of concern?"
But as Mr Gove attempted to rubbish Susanna's figures, she continued: "Sorry Mr Gove, these are literally your figures from NHS Test and Trace, I can give you another figure... on April 2nd, the case rates confirmed per million, in Pakistan 21, Bangladesh 41, India 64.
"I mean, India had a bigger problem at a time when we were not putting it on the red list. You can scoff at these figures but these are NHS PHE figures showing that we were exposed to infections and we left the border to India open for too long."
Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.
