Sir Keir Starmer removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from a No10 study because he doesn’t like people ‘staring down at me’ from the wall, he revealed today.
Sir Keir has been criticised by Tories for rehanging the £100,00 likeness of the Iron Lady elsewhere in No10 after taking power.
No 10 announced that it would be rehung in a ‘first floor meeting room’ because the Labour Prime Minister found it ‘unsettling’.
And speaking to the BBC today he confirmed he has a longstanding aversion to portraits hanging over him while he works.
It came as he defended making £300 winter fuel payments for pensioners means-tested, saying his government would have to do ‘unpopular things’, ahead of a Commons vote.
The Prime Minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves are mired in the first controversy of his premiership, with as many as 30 of his own MPs threatening to refuse to support it, and peers trying to kill it off entirely.
He also used the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg interview to hammer the Tories over their management of the NHS, saying it was ‘broken’ with almost a million children on hospital waiting lists.
Sir Keir has been criticised by Tories for rehanging the £100,00 likeness of the Iron Lady elsewhere in No10 after taking power.
No 10 announced that it would be rehung in a ‘first floor meeting room’ because the Labour Prime Minister found it ‘unsettling’.
The work by Richard Stone, one of Britain’s leading portrait artists, depicts the Iron Lady in the immediate aftermath of the Falklands War in 1982.
Former prime minister Boris Johnson said that the ‘petty’ removal of the painting shows he misled the public when he praised Mrs Thatcher during his election campaign.
Writing in his Daily Mail column, Mr Johnson said: ‘We are entitled to ask: which is the real Starmer? Is he a Thatcher fan, or a visceral Leftie? The answer, my friends, is now clear: not just from his petty decision to remove her picture, but in everything he is doing in Government.’
But speaking to the BBC today the new PM said: ‘I use the study for quietly reading most afternoons … where there is a difficult paper.
‘This is not actually about Margaret Thatcher at all. I don’t like images and pictures of people staring down at me.
‘I’ve found it all my life. When I was a lawyer I used to have pictures of judges. I don’t like it. I like landscapes.
‘This is my study, it is my private place where I got to work. I didn’t want a picture of anyone.’
Sir Keir is facing a major cross-party effort to kill off plans to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners.
One Labour rebel, York MP Rachael Maskell, has already warned that the decision could lead to ‘excess deaths’ this winter.
And Canterbury MP Rosie Duffield, a long-term Starmer critic, suggested that it would be ‘shameful’ for MPs earning £91,346 a year to cut aid to elderly people living on about £13,000 a year.
At the same time peers are set to attempt to kill off the change in the House of Lords, led by former Tory peer Baroness Altmann, who branded it ‘one of the worst decisions I have ever seen’.
In response the PM said his government is prepared to be ‘unpopular’ to get things done. He said the previous Tory administration had ‘run away from difficult decisions’.
‘I’m absolutely convinced we will only deliver that change, I’m absolutely determined we will, if we do the difficult things now. I know they’re unpopular, I know they’re difficult, of course they’re tough choices,’ he said.
‘But it’s a bit like building a house: if you know your foundations are rotten, if you know you’ve got damp or cracks, you can paint over it and pretend that you’ve got a beautiful new house and within six months it all falls apart.
‘Or you can say, ”we’re going to strip it down, we’re going to fix the foundations,” and what then will happen – this is where the hope is there, what then happens is you’ve got a much better house at the end of the exercise, a country built to last, and that’s what I’m determined I’m going to bring about in the time that we’ve got in office.’
A review by eminent surgeon and independent peer Lord Darzi due to be published on Thursday is expected to highlight how children are being let down by the health service.
It is expected to show that 175,000 children are waiting between six months and a year for treatment and 35,000 more than a year, the Sunday Times reported.
Additionally, it will show 100,000 infants waited more than six hours to be seen in accident and emergency departments last year, with waiting times for the under-twos rising 60 per cent in the past 15 years.
It is also likely to pinpoint falling vaccination rates, and rises in ADHD medication and in eating disorder-related hospital admissions for children.
The Prime Minister claimed the health service’s problems stem from ‘the money that was taken out of the NHS, particularly in the early years of the coalition from 2010 onwards, the (Andrew) Lansley reforms, which were hopelessly misconceived. And then, of course, Covid on top of all that, which has put us in this awful position for the NHS’.
Sir Keir also pinned the blame of NHS failings on the previous government, as he has done with the UK’s economic situation.
The Prime Minister added: ‘Our job now through Lord Darzi is properly understand how that came about and bring about the reforms, starting with the first steps, the 40,000 extra appointments.
‘But we’ve got to do the hard yards of reform as well. And as I say, I think it’s only a Labour Government that can do the reform that our NHS needs, and we’ll start on that journey.’
Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins accused Labour of using Lord Darzi’s health review as ‘cover’ to raise taxes in the upcoming Budget.
Speaking to Sky News, Ms Atkins said: ‘I was clear as secretary of state that to build an NHS for the next 75 years, we have to marry reform with investment, and I tried to do that through the productivity plans, bringing tech to the frontline of NHS services, which I hear that Labour is cancelling.
‘What worries me is what we’ve seen so far from the Health Secretary, the only thing he’s done is to give junior doctors a pay rise with no productivity reform.’