I’d never be mates with Sunak, says Starmer
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Sir Keir Starmer has said he would never be “mates” with Rishi Sunak because the two are from “totally different worlds”.
Sir Keir, the Labour leader, said that although he got on “alright” with the Prime Minister, he would not be friends with him if circumstances were different.
He made the comments as he allowed cameras to follow him around the country for an ITV documentary, including while in Parliament ahead of the King’s Speech and at a cafe in his north London constituency.
When it was suggested there might be some similarities between him and the Mr Sunak, and that in different circumstances they might have been friends, Sir Keir said: “We wouldn’t be mates – we’re from totally different worlds.”
He also spoke about his time as a student at Leeds University in the 1980s, when he wrote about the “authoritarian onslaught of Thatcherism” in a Socialist Alternatives magazine.
The Labour leader faced a backlash from his backbenchers last month for praising Thatcher, writing for The Telegraph that she had “sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism”.
Speaking about his critical words in Socialist Alternatives, he told ITV: “Even now I would say the same. What she had was a clarity of mission and purpose. But actually what she did was very destructive.”
Sir Keir, who was elected as MP for Holborn and St Pancras in 2015, became shadow immigration minister under Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader. He resigned in protest at Mr Corbyn’s leadership in June 2016, later returning to become shadow Brexit secretary.
Asked whether he had ever wanted Mr Corbyn to become prime minister, he said: “I didn’t think the Labour Party was in a position to win the last election, I didn’t obviously vote for Corbyn in 2015 or 2016. On the contrary, I resigned in 2016.
“I thought that once that 2016 Brexit referendum had happened, I took the view that what then followed in the next few years was going to be felt for generations and that I thought it was my responsibility to play a full part in that.”
Sir Keir has frequently spoken about his working class upbringing, with a father who worked as a toolmaker and a mother who was a nurse. He went to a selective state school before going to university at Leeds.
Mr Sunak’s parents worked as a GP and a pharmacist. He attended Winchester College before going on to study at Lincoln College, Oxford.
