Keir Starmer clashed with Sky News’ Beth Rigby in a painful interview over the gifts he has received from Labour donors last night.
The PM, currently in New York for the UN General Assembly, was repeatedly questioned over the freebies – worth around £107,000, more than any other sitting MP – he declared to parliament while in opposition.
It was a particularly frosty exchange, with Starmer even deflecting to talk about his invitations to Sky News’ own events.
The journalist asked the PM why he accepted the offer to stay in Labour donor Lord Alli’s mansion during the summer worth £20,000, adding: “Do you get it though? Do you get how it looks?”
Starmer hit back: “If you’re putting to me, Beth, that I should have stayed in my Kentish Town home and disrupted my son’s GCSEs, that that was the right thing to do, then I think you should put that to me.”
Rigby paused, before saying: “OK, so you’re saying you shouldn’t have stayed in the home because you wanted to protect your boy – and I think many parents...”
Starmer then cut in: “Any parent would have made the same decision. I don’t wake up every morning thinking about that.
“I wake up thinking I’ve got a mandate to change the country, I’ve got a mandate to improve living standards, a mandate to improve the health service.”
Rigby then listed all the gifts he has registered since December 2019, including £4,500 on holiday, £16,000 on clothing, nearly £3,000 on glasses and over £35,000 on football.
She asked: “Do you understand the optics of it, when you are the prime minister that said you were going to do politics differently, it looks like you’re claiming loads of freebies. Do you get it? Even if you don’t agree with it.”
The Labour leader acknowledged that he will not be doing donations for clothes now he’s in government.
He then changed tactic, saying: “Beth, I might just gently say – Sky invite us to quite a lot of hospitality events. Your summer party is a great party, costing thousands of pounds, and you invite me every year.
“Presumably you want politicians to continue to come, and part of that is how politics... and that’s what the declarations are for.”
But Rigby did not get distracted, and said that to some members of the public he seemed like a “continuity to [Boris] Johnson”.
The former Tory PM famously took thousands for pounds from Tory donors to refurbishment his Downing Street flat in what became known as wallpapergate.
“Do you just not accept that? Am I on a different page?” Rigby asked the PM.
Starmer said he had explained what happened with the accommodation and explained why he went to Sky News’ own parties.
Rigby pushed: “So you would see that as a work event. Would you see a Taylor Swift concert as a work event, for example?”
“I think it’s a judgement call for each member of parliament,” he replied.
Starmer has also deflected criticism after he took seats in a corporate box at an Arsenal match, saying it would cost the taxpayer more in security for him to sit in the stands.
His popularity has plummeted amid the controversy and is now even lower than Rishi Sunak’s, less than three months on from Labour’s landslide victory.