Sir Keir Starmer has claimed he only backed Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister in the 2019 general election because he was certain that the left-wing Labour leader’s bid was doomed anyway.
In a striking moment during the Sky News election debate on Wednesday night, the current Labour leader was grilled over what host Beth Rigby described as his “catalogue of broken promises and changed positions”.
Asked whether he had meant it when he said his predecessor would make a great prime minister, Sir Keir replied: “I was certain we would lose the 2019 election. We were not ready. I was certain we would lose it.”
Sir Keir added: “I did campaign for Labour, of course I did. I will openly say I campaigned for Labour. I wanted good colleagues to be returned into the Labour Party, and I wanted a party that was capable of being changed so we can face the future again.”
Pressed by host Beth Rigby that he then had not meant it when he said Mr Corbyn would be a great PM, Sir Keir repeated multiple times: “I was certain that we would lose”.
“Of course I campaigned for the Labour Party at the last election, and the election before that and the one before that,” he added. “I’ve always campaigned for the Labour Party and I’m glad I did, and I wanted good colleagues to be returned to have their seats so that we could fight for the future of the Labour Party.”
Sir Keir was given his first shadow ministerial position by Mr Corbyn just days after the veteran left-winger was elected Labour leader in September 2015, and was promoted to the role of Mr Corbyn’s shadow Brexit minister a year later. He campaigned for Labour in both the 2017 and 2019 elections.
After Mr Corbyn’s defeat in 2019, Sir Keir ran for leader on a leftwing platform in which he pledged to keep his predecessor’s anti-austerity and nationalisation agenda alive.
And in a clip shared by left-wing journalist Owen Jones on Wednesday night, Sir Keir could be seen telling crowds at a 2020 Labour leadership race event: “Don’t trash the last four years, because what Jeremy Corbyn brought to this party – he made this an anti-austerity party that stood against cuts.”
Pressed in Wednesday’s debate that he had “dropped six or seven” of his 10 leadership pledges after Sir Keir claimed “most of them are still in place”, the Labour leader said he had “asked himself honestly: ‘are these country first, party second?’ And if the answer to that is no, I’ve changed them.”
Hours earlier, Sir Keir used his predecessor’s 2019 manifesto as a punchline to attack the Tories – claiming Rishi Sunak’s party had built a “Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto” that will “load everything into the wheelbarrow” without explaining how to pay for it, dubbing it: “A recipe for five more years of chaos.”
Asked why voters can trust anything he says, Sir Keir said of the 2019 election: “When you lose that badly, you don’t look at voters and say ‘what on Earth do you think you were doing’? You look at your party and say ‘we have to change’.”
Responding to Sir Keir’s claim to have supported Mr Corbyn because he was certain he would lose, the left-wing grassroots group Momentum said: “The Labour Right sabotaged their own party’s general election campaign in 2017. And now Starmer himself admits this. Shameful.”
Sir Keir’s Labour removed the whip from Mr Corbyn in 2020 after he claimed the scale of antisemitism in the party was “dramatically overstated”. He has since been banned from Labour and is running in the upcoming election as an independent.
