MP Lee Anderson kicked out of Commons for saying Keir Starmer ‘cannot lie straight in mattress’
Lee Anderson was removed from the House of Commons after accusing PM Keir Starmer of lying and saying he ‘can’t lie straight in bed’, adding he would not retract his statement
Lee Anderson accused the PM of lying(Image: Sky News)
Reform UK MP Lee Anderson was kicked out of the House of Commons on Monday afternoon after accusing Sir Keir Starmer of lying.
Anderson says: “The problem is no one believes him. The public don’t believe him. The MPs on this side of the House don’t believe him. His own gullible backbenchers don’t believe him. So does the prime minister agree with me? He’s been lying.”
Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle told him to withdraw his accusation because MPs are banned from accusing each other of lying. However, Anderson responded: “I will not withdraw. That man couldn’t lie straight in bed.” He was kicked out of the Commons and ordered to leave the parliamentary estate.
It came as Keir Starmer was answering questions from the dispatch box after making a speech insisting he had no idea Peter Mandelson failed vetting checks, but was given the all-clear anyway.
The PM claimed he was “staggered” to only find out last Tuesday that Mandelson had actually failed his top-level security checks.
He threw civil servants under the bus, claiming it “beggars belief” that Foreign Office officials didn’t tell him Mandelson was a security risk. He even fired Sir Olly Robbins over the mess – despite allies of the civil servant insisting the law forbids ministers from seeing private vetting data.
“I simply do not accept that Foreign Office officials could not have informed me,” Starmer said at the dispatch box.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch wasn’t buying the clueless act. She accused the PM of a bombshell breach of the Ministerial Code, claiming he “inadvertently misled” the House and failed to correct the record for nearly a week.
“The Prime Minister has chosen not to repeat the truth from the dispatch box,” she blasted, as the PM looked on all red-faced. Despite the grilling, Starmer refused to budge from his script.
Kemi Badenoch said the PM is blaming everyone other than himself. She said: “The prime minister has thrown his staff and his officials under the bus. This is a man who once said: ‘I will carry the can for the mistakes of any organisation I lead’.
“Instead, he has sacked his cabinet secretary, he has sacked his director of communications, he has sacked his chief of staff, and he has now sacked the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office. All of these people fired for a decision.”
Senior Labour MP John McDonnell alleged the prime minister gave an “unspoken message” to civil servants to appoint Peter Mandelson whatever issues there were. “The message that unspoken message to civil servants was what Mandelson wants, Mandelson gets,” he says.
Starmer reiterated that the vetting scandal wouldn’t happen again now that he has changed the process. MPs continued to jeer and laugh at the Prime Minister as he made his excuses.
