How Labour leader was put on the spot
Sir Keir Starmer on Sky’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday
SOPHY RIDGE: OK, now I do need to ask you about what happened in Durham. This is when you were pictured drinking beer with party activists ahead of a by-election. At the time of course, people in England were banned from mixing indoors apart from at work, and there’s the picture there. There has been lots of coverage of this, was Angela Rayner there?
SIR KEIR STARMER: Yes. We were in the office, we were working, we paused for something to eat, there was no party, no rules were broken and that is the long and the short of it and Durham police looked at it and decided there was absolutely nothing wrong. What we’ve seen this week is lots of...
SR: Can I just ...?
KS: Look, I know what’s going on here. We’ve got an election on Thursday and there is just...
SR: What is going on here?
KS: Tory MPs trying to throw mud around because they’ve got nothing to say on the central issue of the cost of living. If they
were as focused on the cost of living as they were on Durham, millions of people would be saying good thing too.
SR: I understand your frustration at this event being compared or considered the equivalent of the lockdown breaches, I understand. What I struggle ....
KS: It’s not a breach, that is the problem with the comparison.
SR: What I struggle with is why, if Angela Rayner was there, you said that she wasn’t there? I don’t understand why that happened.
KS: Just a second, it was a mistake, we made a mistake.
SR: I don’t doubt it was a mistake but why wasn’t it corrected? It just looks a bit shifty even if it wasn’t, why didn’t you correct the mistake when you realised?
KS: We were asked twice and I didn’t realise we had made the mistake before until it came out this week. We are a busy office, we made a mistake, it was a genuine mistake and I take responsibility for it. I run the office, we simply made a mistake, I don’t think anybody would seriously say Keir Starmer’s team lied to the media about this. We made a mistake...
SR: The media was told that information and it wasn’t corrected.
KS: Sophy, you will know this from running offices yourself. It is a genuine mistake and I take responsibility for that.