Rishi Sunak has been called “out of touch” after taking a £1,000 bet with Piers Morgan on whether deportation flights to Rwanda will take off before the general election.
Morgan said to the prime minister on TalkTV: “I’ll bet you £1,000 to a refugee charity you don’t get anybody on those planes before the election. Will you take that bet?”
Sunak shook hands with Morgan on the wager and said he was “working incredibly hard to get the people on the planes”.
The government’s attempt to send asylum seekers to Rwanda for their claims to be processed has been blocked by the supreme court, which ruled the policy unlawful in November. Sunak has said he can salvage the scheme.
Opposition parties criticised his decision to agree to the bet with Morgan. The shadow paymaster general, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “Not a lot of people facing rising mortgages, bills and food prices are casually dropping £1,000 bets. It just shows that Rishi Sunak is totally out of touch with working people.”
The shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said the bet was “deeply distasteful” and that Sunak was “splashing his cash around like it’s Monopoly money – betting on a policy that he has lost control over”.
The Scottish National party reported Sunak to the independent adviser on ministers’ interests, Laurie Magnus, claiming the bet could be a breach of the ministerial code. Kirsty Blackman said: “It is shameful and grotesque that Rishi Sunak, one of the richest men in the UK, is betting money on whether he can ship vulnerable refugees abroad in time for the election.”
The Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael raised a point of order in the Commons saying Sunak should include his bet on his register of interests.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said: “Piers offered it up, and what you will see from the response is that we will see flights getting off the ground.”
Sunak drew further criticism for saying “the facts speak for themselves” when asked if he believed the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, was a terrorist sympathiser.
The prime minister accused Starmer of having represented Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2008 while the group was trying to resist a ban on its activities in Germany. Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government last month.
“There he was, he was their lawyer when they were trying to resist this. We’ve just proscribed them because we think that’s what they are. These things speak to people’s values.”
A spokesperson for Starmer’s office dismissed the attack as “desperate nonsense”.
“Keir Starmer oversaw the first ever prosecution of senior members of al-Qaida, the jailing of the airline liquid bomb plotters and the deportation of countless terrorists,” the spokesperson said.
“With Keir’s leadership, charge and conviction rates for sexual offences rose, victims were better supported, and the [Crown Prosecution Service] was reformed. The prime minister can only dream of having such a record of serving his country.”
Sunak and other Tories have repeatedly attacked Starmer for having worked with Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2008, shortly before he became the director of public prosecutions. Starmer was part of a team of lawyers who submitted an application in June 2008 to the European court of human rights to challenge a ban on its activities in Germany. The appeal was rejected.
A Labour official said Starmer had not represented the organisation in court but was part of a three-chamber team that submitted an initial application to Strasbourg, and that the nature of legal work involved representing and advising people no matter their views.
Sunak raised the link at prime minister’s questions in January. The government proscribed the group for promoting terrorism and praising the 7 October attacks on Israel.
