After Elon Musk continued to lambast the Labour lot over the weekend, Sir Keir Starmer this morning used a press conference to hit out at the tech billionaire and defend his Home Office minister Jess Phillips – who the Twitter CEO said ‘deserves to be in prison’. The PM fumed today that ‘Jess Phillips has done a thousand times more than [her critics] have even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.’ Strong stuff.
But the issue of Labour hypocrisy has been brought to Mr S’s attention – not least given Starmer himself signed off on a rather controversial attack ad that took aim at former Tory leader Rishi Sunak. The advert, released in the run up to 2023’s local elections, claimed the then Conservative PM didn’t think adults convicted of child sex assaults should go to jail. The Labour jibe included the stat that ‘4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children under 16 served no prison time’ – yet rather interestingly it relied on data collected from 2010, five years before Sunak became an MP and over a decade before the Tory politician was made prime minister. Why let the facts get in the way of a creative campaign tactic, eh?
Despite the intense backlash that came about as a result of the attack, Sir Keir stood by the ad – insisting he supported its message ‘no matter how squeamish it might make some feel’. Phillips herself told Matt Forde’s The Political Party podcast that she was ‘fine with the advert’, while Labour strategists vowed at the time to press on with more attack messages over the campaign period.
The shoe is certainly on the other foot now though, eh? How times change…
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