Abbot: Blair has questions to answer

Tony Blair's intervention on behalf of millionaire businessman Lakshmi Mittal "remains a conundrum", a Labour MP told the House of Commons on Tuesday.

Diane Abbott said that the prime minister had failed to give a clear explanation about why he lobbied on behalf of Mittal's Sidex firm, which was bidding to take control of Romania's privatised steel industry.

During a Commons debate into the steelgate affair, Plaid Cymru's Adam Price said the prime minister had given his backing to a bid which was certain to do long-term damage to British steel jobs.

Price told MPs: "The government throughout this affair have singularly failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the central question. Why did a British prime minister put the full weight of the Crown Behind a foreign company's investment into Eastern Europe that will cost British jobs."

The Welsh secretary, Paul Murphy, said the opposition had become obsessed by "nonsense about semantics" over the Sidex affair.

He said the deal would benefit UK industry in the long term and attacked Plaid Cymru's isolationism.

"If it is that the Romanian economy has to prosper and develop and becomes part of an enlarged Europe, then clearly it is the case that companies in Great Britain, and in Wales, will benefit from the change in that economy," he said.

"Plaid Cymru often claim that they are truly an internationalist party. They've said they want to see Wales in Europe and Britain has nothing to do with this scenario."

Apology

The Welsh nationalists had earlier said that Blair should apologise for his involvement in the bid.

Plaid Cymru claimed his letter of support for Mittal's bid to the Romanian government was damaging to the British steel industry.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Elfyn Llwyd said that Downing Street had failed to answer a series of questions.

"Why should UK taxpayers' money be used to assist a person who is not a British national who has no British interests?" he said.

"Why, secondly, should you assist a man who is actually undermining the British steel industry, by which I mean tomorrow there will be an announcement by the American government that import tariffs have been put up against European and UK steel, further losing thousands of jobs?"

"This is a scandalous affair and it would be far better if the prime minister got up and confessed it was a mistake and said whatever he knew or did not know because he should have come clean about it. The story just rumbles on because he is trying to avoid questions and just cover it up."