LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer refused to apologise for downing beers with colleagues indoors during Covid restrictions – calling it a work event just like Boris
Sir Keir was angrily branded a “hypocrite” by a caller on LBC this morning but he hit back saying No10 was running a campaign “to drag everyone into the gutter with them.”
He insisted he didn’t break any rules while he had a takeaway in a constituency office while working on the election campaign in 2021 – saying it was a break during a work event.
His excuse echoes the PM who said his 25 minutes stint at a Downing Street party was withint he rules as it was a for work.
The Labour leader has demanded Boris Johnson resign over the dozens of Downing Street parties held during various Covid lockdowns.
But he insisted the clip of him was totally different in the tense radio exchange.
He said: “The picture of me was in a constituency office up in the North East, it was I think, three or four days before the May elections, so we’re really busy. I was with my team going across the country from place to place.
“We’re in the office, working in the office and we stopped for a takeaway, and then we carried on working and that is the long and the short of it.
“There was no breach of the rules. There was no party. And there was absolutely no comparison with the Prime Minister.”
Asked if he was prepared to apologise, Sir Keir said: “We didn’t break any rules, we were working in the office and we stopped for a takeaway.”
He added: “We did nothing wrong.”
The LBC caller who asked about the incident dismissed Sir Keir’s response as “like listening to Boris Johnson without the harrumphing”, adding: “You should apologise and you are a hypocrite for not.”
Tory MP Scott Benton blasted the leader of the opposition tweeting: “Pictured drinking beer at indoor gathering whilst restrictions were in place.
“But says it was a work event…looks a bit like hypocrisy when you allege others have broken the rules when you appear to have broken them yourself doesn’t it?”
The Labour leader was asked whether he would prefer to fight a damaged Mr Johnson at the next election, rather than Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss – the frontrunners to succeed the Prime Minister.
Sir Keir said: “I will take on whoever is leading, I don’t really care.
“I think that it’s in the national interest that Boris Johnson goes now… Put party politics to one side, he’s lost all authority and that matters, whatever party you are in.
“We’re still in the pandemic and it’s very important that people behave in the way that we need them to behave, but he has lost the authority to ask people to do so.”
