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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Comment
Rachelle Abbott

The Leader podcast: Why won’t Boris Johnson apologise to Keir Starmer over Savile slur?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Kirsty O’Connor/PA)

(Picture: PA Wire)

Several MPs are calling on the Prime Minister to apologise for comments he made about Sir Keir Starmer in the commons, after the Labour Leader was mobbed outside Westminster.

(You can also listen here or wherever you stream your podcasts)

Last week the PM made a discredited claim that Sir Keir ‘failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile’ when he was director of public prosecutions; a comment repeated by a group of protestors who surrounded the Labour leader yesterday.

Tory MP Tobias Ellwood has warned the UK is moving towards a ‘Trumpian style of politics’ and the sister of murdered MP Jo Cox, Kim Leadbeater tweeted: “Words have consequences, leaders have a duty to behave responsibly & politics is not a game”.

The Evening Standard’s Political Editor Nicholas Cecil discusses the calls for Boris Johnson to apologise, whether politics is moving into a ‘Trumpian era’, and whether the Savile slur was a political tool to divert attention away from ‘Party-gate’.

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