What is really going on in politics? Get our daily email briefing straight to your inbox Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Piers Morgan gave Ukip leader Paul Nuttall a savaging this morning over his support for privatising the NHS.

Nuttall was selected to stand in the Stoke Central by-election over the weekend, to contest the seat vacated by Labour's Tristram Hunt.

In a 2010 post on his website - which has since been deleted - Nuttall praised the coalition government for “bringing a whiff of privatisation into the beleaguered National Health Service.”

He added: “I would argue that the very existence of the NHS stifles competition, and as competition drives quality and choice, innovation and improvements are restricted.”

In a 2011 hustings he described the health service as a “monolithic hangover from days gone by.”

The audience at the Oldham event booed and hissed as he called for more “free market” solutions to be introduced into British healthcare.

In an interview on Good Morning Britain, Morgan asked why the post had been removed from his website, to which Nuttall claimed it had been part of an “old website”, which had been taken down entirely.

He went on to say he’d made the comments several years ago and had “learned from what I’d said.”

Morgan asked why, if he had changed his mind over something so significant as NHS privatisation over five years, why the British public should trust anything he has to say now.

Nuttall replied: “Firstly, I was mainly talking about procurement back at that point,” before saying Ukip has never and would never under his leadership campaign on privatising the NHS.

He added: “They were words, the Labour Party has acted. 5% of the NHS was privatised under the Labour Party, so I will not be hectored or lectured to by a political party … which not only privatised part of the NHS but oversaw the Mid Staffs scandal.”

Under questioning from host Susanna Reid, Nuttall admitted to having tried and failed four times to be elected to Parliament.

Morgan presented him with a quote from Labour’s Jon Ashworth, who said: “Just because Mr Nuttall is a scouser with a Liverpool accent, he thinks all working class people will vote for him.”

Nuttall replied: “The last two Labour MPs in this constituency were public schoolboys from down south, so I think I’ll have more in common with the people of Stoke on Trent.”

(Image: Getty)

He promised to campaign on the things that are important to “working class people” - law and order, immigration and “putting local people to the top of the housing queues and putting British people to the top of the job market.”

He claimed some of the money paid to the EU in membership fees would be spent on the NHS.

He put the membership figure at “around £32 million every single day…and that is a net figure.”

Fact checking organisation Full Fact have calculated the figure is around £9 million less than Mr Nuttall claimed.

And he repeated the claim that Donald Trump having moved a bust of Winston Churchill from the President’s private residence down one floor to the Oval Office was evidence he is an “Anglophile” and would put Britain at the front of the queue in trade negotiations.