He was asked FIVE TIMES

The Labour leader Keir Starmer has refused to say whether he meant it when he said Jeremy Corbyn would make a ‘great prime minister’ in 2019. His refusal came as part of the BBC Question Time leaders special in which he was asked a series of questions about his support for the Labour’s election campaigns during Corbyn’s leadership of the party.

The first question put to him from the audience related to his comments about Rishi Sunak, who Starmer accused of putting forward a ‘Jeremy Corbyn-style’ manifesto. The audience member asked Starmer why he supported Corbyn’s manifesto in the 2019 general election.

In his response, Starmer said: “In 2019, I campaigned for the Labour Party, as I’ve always campaigned for the Labour Party. I wanted good colleagues to be returned to parliament. I knew we had a job and a half to do as the Labour Party because I didn’t think we were going to win that election.

“Afterwards, because we got the worst results since 1935, the electorate clearly gave their verdict to us, and we did a lot of work on how we needed to change the party. And that started with what went wrong. And in all the analysis we did, people said they quite liked some of what was in our manifesto, but they thought there was too much and they wanted to see something that was fully costed and fully funded.

“And that’s why my manifesto going forward for this election is fully costed and fully funded – everything we say we’re going to do, we say how much it’s going to be and where the money is coming from, because that’s the sort of stability that we need.

“The other thing that’s obviously happened since then is Liz Truss put forward a number of unfunded commitments, in her case tax cuts, and look what it did to the economy, and there’ll be people in this audience, people who are watching who are still paying the price for that. And I said it about Rishi Sunak’s manifesto, because he’s now included unfunded commitments in that, so he’s repeating the mistake.”

He went on to say that the 2019 Labour manifesto was ‘overloaded’, at which point the show’s host Fiona Bruce intervened and probed Starmer about his past support for Corbyn. Specifically, she asked about Starmer’s comments from 2019 in which he said Corbyn would make a ‘great Prime Minister’, asking whether he ‘meant it’, or whether he had his ‘fingers crossed behind his back’.

Starmer didn’t answer the question directly, instead starting by saying: “I didn’t think we would win that election”, leading to Bruce to intervene again. She asked: “Irrespective of that, you said he’d make a great prime minister – did you mean it?”

Again, Starmer didn’t respond directly, saying: “It wasn’t a question that really arose because I didn’t think we were going to win the election”.

And again, Bruce stepped in, asking: “But we all heard you saying he’d make a great prime minister – that was your way of telling the people here: vote for him. Did you not mean that?”

This time Starmer reverted to his earlier messages: “I was campaigning for the Labour Party, and I’m glad I did.”

Later, Bruce tried another time, asking: “Just answer this yes or no, when you said Jeremy Corbyn would make a good prime minister, did you mean it?”

Bruce didn’t allow Starmer to divert his answer to speak about Boris Johnson, asking him one final time whether he meant it when he said Corbyn would make a great prime minister.

And in his final response, Starmer said: “I didn’t think we were in a position to win that election,” leading to Bruce to say clearly: “that’s not an answer.”

In total, she asked him five times.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward

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