Keir Starmer ‘inherited burning skip of a party’, blasts Labour leader’s ex-chief of staff on The Sun’s new show
LABOUR was a “burning skip” before Sir Keir Starmer took over, Baroness Jenny Chapman told The Sun’s new show today.
Sir Keir’s ex-chief of staff insisted her party is “in a fit shape” to fight a general election after the disaster of the Jeremy Corbyn years.
On episode two of Never Mind the Ballots, Baroness Jenny told host Harry Cole: “I think most people are looking at what the Tories have had to offer and they’re deciding that yes, Keir Starmer actually is good enough to be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
“And I agree with them.
“What they see is a man who has done what he said he would do in the Labour Party, he has turned it around, he inherited a burning skip of a party in 2019.”
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Baroness Jenny added: “Sir Keir’s got them in a fit shape to be electable to win the country today within one term of Parliament.
“That’s never been done before. And he’s somebody who’s got the integrity to do that.”
Mr Corbyn was Labour chief from 2015-2020.
Under his leadership the party was found to be institutionally racist by Britain’s equalities watchdog.
Labour also received its worst result since 1935 in the 2019 general election.
Sir Keir served as Shadow Brexit Secretary in Mr Corbyn’s front bench and urged the public to make him PM the last time Brits took to national polls.
When the Islington North MP stood down as leader he was replaced by the current opposition chief.
On tonight’s episode of Never Mind The Ballots Baroness Jenny appears alongside Tory former ministers Matt Warman and Jake Berry.
Reform UK’s only MP Lee Anderson was also due to appear on the show, but chickened out at the last minute.
Next week it will be Rishi Sunak‘s turn to be grilled by Harry.
It comes as a new mega poll for The Sun tonight puts Labour on 45 points, followed by the Tories on 24 and Reform UK on 12.
Worryingly for No10, which is hoping to build an election fight back based on undecided voters, eight in ten say they are now unlikely to change their minds by polling day.
And Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party was ahead in who would best handle all of the key policy areas, such as the economy and NHS, according to Savanta.
Remarkably, Labour even held a small lead on who has the best policy to stop the boats – even though it is busy trying to thwart the Rwanda deportation plan.
On the latest episode Tory MPs urged the PM to come out swinging.
In a significant intervention, a leading member of the One nation group of moderate Tories said the time had come to tackle the European Convention on Human Rights.
The group’s deputy leader Mr Warman told the show “proper changes” are required to our relationship with the Strasbourg court.
It comes as the number of migrants who have arrived in the UK so far in 2023 has hit the highest level ever recorded for the first three months of a year.
Mr Warman, a former Remainer, said: “I want to see the ECHR reformed properly, not just nibbling around the edges.
“Proper changes that make it work not just for us, but for refugees themselves and for other countries around the world. So there is real work to do.”
Insisting the PM could do it, he added: “You look at what Rishi Sunak has achieved with the Windsor Framework, with a whole host of other globally significant negotiations, I think he could deliver that.”
Boss of the Tories Northern bloc Sir Jake Berry – an arch-Sunak critic – said it was too soon to write off the Tories, despite the horror polling numbers
Sir Jake told the show: “Polls have been turned around very quickly so my advice to the Prime Minister would be if he is listening, hello Rishi, absolutely, we can do this Prime Minister.”
He added: “What people behind the doorsteps tell me is they want the governing party to get on and govern to concentrate how we change and improves people’s lives. They hate all this infighting and all those sort of questions over leadership.”
But pollster Chris Hopkins from Savanta warned chances of a turn around are small, adding: “We’ve seen a relatively stable kind of nine to 12 point lead for Keir Starmer for quite a while.
He told the show: “It appears relatively irreversible. You know, things can change, campaigns can change things. We saw that in 2017. But at the minute, you know, polling is ultimately a now-cast bit this definitely implies that there’ll be a Tory wipe out.”