Jeremy Corbyn has said that Sir Keir Starmer’s claims that the pair were never friends is “primary school stuff”.
The former Labour leader – blocked from running as the party’s candidate in Islington North – said that he had always seen Sir Keir as a “colleague” when the pair worked together.
The left-winger also hit out at Labour’s recent controversial social media campaign attacking Rishi Sunak – calling it “bad news all around”.
It comes after Sir Keir denied he was ever a friend of the former leader. “It makes me sad, actually. I don’t know why he says that,” Mr Corbyn told LBC.
“I mean, I worked with Starmer. He was in the shadow cabinet. I went to Brussels with him. Yeah, I worked with him, I worked with lots of people,” Mr Corbyn told LBC.
Asked if he regarded Sir Keir as a friend, he said: “I regarded him as a colleague. I never regarded him as a friend. I didn’t spend time hanging out with him. A friend is somebody you go out for a meal with, have a chat, call their house.”
He added: “So, why he suddenly announced to the world that I was a friend and then a short time later, now I was not a friend. This is primary school stuff.”
He also labelled the now-notorious Labour attack ad, which claimed Mr Sunak did not think child sex abusers should go to prison, as “bad news all around”.
Mr Corbyn said: “I think the idea that you say something unbelievably awful about an opponent as a kind of gesture towards them is not very good or very sensible. I do not believe in that sort of thing.”
Labour’s NEC last month backed a proposal from Sir Keir not to endorse Mr Corbyn in contesting his north London seat for Labour at the next election. Mr Corbyn said it was a “shameful attack on party democracy”.
It comes as New Labour architect Peter Mandelson backed Labour’s controversial attack ad about child sex abuse, arguing that the party can’t count on right-wing newspapers to “do it on their behalf”.
Asked if he would have signed off on such an advert in the New Labour days, he told Times Radio: “Yes I would”.
Mr Mandelson said the Tories “have the support of the right-leaning, the Conservative-supporting media” for the personal attacks. “Those newspapers do it on their behalf.”
Shadow heath secretary Wes Streeting defended the anti-Sunak ads to Labour MPs at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on Monday night.
The close Starmer ally also condemned “cowardly” briefings against shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper after her team made clear she was not responsible for the first social media ad.
Mr Streeting told MPs that Ms Cooper “runs rings around Suella Braverman, as she has every home secretary the Tories have put up to face her”.
