Treasury minister Darren Jones has defended his controversial Question Time appearance, claiming Reform UK has selectively edited his comments about small boat migrants to misrepresent his position.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury faced fierce criticism after telling the BBC programme’s audience that “the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women” during Thursday’s broadcast.
Speaking to GB News, Jones insisted: “It’s been clipped by Reform in a particular way. If you look at the whole conversation, I wasn’t referring to the whole number of people being a majority of women and babies I was telling a story about a visit I had to the Border Security Command.”
The minister’s comments sparked immediate backlash, with Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch demanding an apology and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage calling him “another clueless Labour minister.”
Jones explained he was specifically describing boats he witnessed during a recent visit to Dover’s Border Security Command, not making a claim about overall migration statistics.
“I was shown a number of dinghies which did have a majority of women and babies in who needed treatment for burns because of the mixing of oil from the engine with the sea water,” he told GB News.
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The minister acknowledged his communication could have been clearer. “Could I have been clearer in my language and said ‘those two specific boats in my visit?’, I think the answer to that is evidently yes given the reaction we’ve had from the public.”
He maintained that whilst “of course the overall majority of people arriving illegally on small boats are men,” the specific vessels he referenced during his Dover visit did contain mostly women and children.
The Question Time exchange occurred when Jones described visiting Dover and seeing “dinghies put together by these organised criminal gangs” before stating that “the majority of the people in these boats are children, babies and women.”
Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf immediately challenged this claim, asserting that more than 90% of Channel crossings involve adult men. When Jones disputed this figure, saying “that’s not true,” presenter Fiona Bruce pressed him to clarify his position.
Home Office figures show that 81 per cent of small boat arrivals in the first three months of 2025 were adult men, with 76 per cent recorded as adult male throughout 2024.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called for Jones to apologise, stating: “We’re not going to have any trust in the government or politicians if people can’t believe what it is they are saying.”
Despite the controversy, Jones reaffirmed the government’s commitment to tackling Channel crossings through increased border security funding.
“It’s right the Government continues to get on with funding the Border Security Command, we put record amounts of funding in the spending review this week to be able to tackle these criminal gangs and we’re going to get control of our border and get these numbers down,” he told GB News.
When pressed on the credibility of these pledges given continuing high numbers of crossings, Jones admitted “it is a problem.”
“That’s why we’re putting more money into the Border Security Command, why we’re putting more effort into working with the French and other counterparts in Europe to be able to tackle what are pan-European networks of organised criminal gangs,” he said.
