Paul Nuttall said: ‘I haven’t lost a close, personal friend. I’ve lost someone who I know.’ [Image: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images].

Only yesterday, Paul Nuttall was on the radio saying, “I feel bloody angry, angrier than I’ve ever been and I thought I had seen everything in politics. I know it’s a dirty game, but this is beyond scraping the barrel to be perfectly honest with you. It’s upset me personally, it’s upset my family.”

Now he has backtracked hugely – but reckons he’s not responsible for a claim on his website that he “lost close personal friends”. Well, who put that out there, then?

In any case, it’s his website and he is responsible for all of its content, whether he likes it or not. It is beyond the realm of possibility that he would not have known what it said.

How long will it be until he makes another admission – this time about his claim to have been at Hillsborough himself?

Mr Nuttall was a pupil at Savio high school in Bootle at the time. One of his former teachers has told the Guardian that the school believed it had known every boy who had been at Hillsborough, and that Mr Nuttall was not one of them.

This is a man who wants to be the member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central.

He will be expected to stand up for the people of that constituency, to speak truthfully on their behalf, and to speak truthfully to them about his activities.

Does anybody really, honestly, believe that will happen if he is elected to Parliament, based on the evidence of the past few days?

No.

Nor do I.

The Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall, is facing more questions about Hillsborough after being forced to admit that claims on his website about losing close friends in the disaster were false.

In an interview with Liverpool’s Radio City News on Tuesday, it was put to him that in 2012 he said on his website that he had “lost close personal friends”. Nuttall denied making the claim.

When the presenter, Dave Easson, who was at Hillsborough on the day of the disaster, showed him the evidence that the claim had been made on his website, Nuttall replied: “I haven’t lost a close, personal friend. I’ve lost someone who I know.”

Nuttall then suggested that he was not responsible for the statement, saying: “I’m sorry about that, but that is something … I haven’t put that out. That is wrong.”

Source: Paul Nuttall admits claim he lost close friends at Hillsborough was false | Politics | The Guardian

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