Susanna Reid left Priti Patel (almost) speechless during her appearance on Wednesday’s Good Morning Britain.

The home secretary was grilled on the ITV morning show about the government’s advice allowing families to meet at Christmas and their subsequent attempts to blame the British public for a rise in coronavirus cases over the festive period.

When Susanna’s co-host Piers Morgan suggested that it was a “catastrophic mistake” that the country had not been placed into lockdown before Christmas as the scale and speed of the new Covid-19 variant became clear, the MP suggested that the government “were not telling people to get together in mass gatherings.”

“We were telling people not to meet with wider family,” Priti stated.

An obviously riled Susanna told her: “You allowed them to do it under the rules.

“You can’t say ‘well on the one hand we allow people to do it, and on the other hand we told people not to’,” Susanna continued. 

“It’s exactly what we knew you were going to do back in December. You were going to allow people to do it – allow people to mix – and in January, you were going to blame people who did, who knew it was legitimate under the rules. You were going to blame them for what then happened, even though it was within the government’s control to change that.

“You allowed them to do it under the rules.”

Clearly rattled, the home secretary insisted that “the government is not blaming anybody”.

Elsewhere in her interview, she was pressed repeatedly on crime records disappearing from the crime register by Piers and Susanna and admitted she didn’t “know for sure” where the missing files were.

“They could still be in the police national computer, we don’t know for sure… there are other systems… there are multiple records,” she said.

Asked if she would resign if they don’t find the records, she said: “It is my imperative to make sure we secure this data.”

Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.