Keir Starmer has finally admitted why he campaigned for former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister in 2019, despite spending much of this general election campaign distancing himself from his predecessor. Even though Mr Starmer did not think they would win the election, the former Director of Prosecutions still thought Corbyn would make a better PM than the scandal-ridden Boris Johnson.
The current Labour leader was quizzed on whether he genuinely thought his predecessor would be a “great” leader of the UK, after an audience member asked him a question about authenticity and his decision to pull the party to the centre after their loss in 2019. Mr Starmer said the question of whether Corbyn would be PM had not “really arose because I didn’t think we were going to win the election.”
But after being probed further by host Fiona Bruce during the election special, and asked to give a yes or no answer, Keir Starmer finally admitted that he thought Corbyn would still have made a better Prime Minister than Boris Johnson – who was ultimately ousted over a series of competency and ethics scandals that saw him attend a party during Covid lockdown and appoint a known sex pest to the whip’s office.
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The two-hour broadcast also saw John Swinney of the SNP, Sir Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats and Rishi Sunak face questions from the audience over the future of the country. While Swinney and Davey took fire for their records in government, Sunak faced open hostility at points after defending his National Service police and committing to leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
Sir Keir stood by his endorsement of Mr Corbyn’s 2019 manifesto, even though he recently likened it to Rishi Sunak’s current policies. Recently, the Labour leader has been distancing himself from Mr Corbyn, even as polls predict a landslide victory for Labour in the upcoming election.
Making his pitch to the country on his economic literacy, he still slammed the Tories’ election pitch as a “Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto”, accusing them of piling promises “load everything into the wheelbarrow” without a plan or stating how they would pay for it.
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A member of the audience brought up the Labour leader’s previous comments, saying: “You criticised the Tory manifesto as Jeremy Corbyn-like,” they pointed out, before adding: “Anything you want can go in it, nothing is costed. Why did you back his original manifesto in 2019? “
Sir Keir Starmer responded: “In 2019 I campaigned for the Labour Party as I’ve always campaigned for the Labour Party.”
He admitted that post-election, it was apparent to him that voters “thought it was too much and they wanted to see something which was fully costed and fully funded”.
Jeremy Corbyn has himself criticised Sir Keir for trying to ‘rewrite history’ with his recent remarks. The now independent candidate for Islington North accused Sir Keir of showing “double standards” by voicing this stance now.