Señor Keir Starmer removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from a No10 studio because he doesn’t like people “staring” at him from the wall, he revealed today.
Sir Keir has been criticised for conservatives for re-hanging the £100,000 image of the Iron Lady elsewhere in Number 10 after taking power.
Number 10 announced that it would be re-hung in a “first floor meeting room” because… Labour The Prime Minister found it “disturbing”.
And talking to him BBC Today he confirmed that he has long had an aversion to the portraits that hang above him while he works.
This came as he defended the idea of making £300 winter fuel payments for pensioners based on their means, saying his government would have to do “unpopular things”, ahead of a vote in the House of Commons.
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor Rachel Reeves are mired in the first controversy of his term as prime minister, with Up to 30 of his own MPs threatened to refuse to support him and his peers tried to eliminate him altogether.
He also used Sunday’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg to criticise the Conservatives for their handling of the NHS, saying it was “broken” with almost a million children on hospital waiting lists.
The Conservatives have criticised Sir Keir for re-hanging the £100,000 image of the Iron Lady elsewhere in Number 10 after taking power.
Number 10 announced it would be re-hung in a “first floor briefing room” because the Labour Prime Minister found it “disturbing”.
The work by Richard Stone, one of Britain’s leading portrait painters, depicts the Iron Lady immediately after the Falklands War in 1982.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the “petty” removal of the painting showed he misled the public when… He praised Mrs Thatcher during her election campaign.
In his Daily Mail column, Johnson wrote: “We are entitled to ask: who is the real Starmer? Is he a Thatcher fan or a visceral leftist? The answer, my friends, is now clear: not just because of his petty decision to remove his photo, but because of everything he is doing in government.”
But speaking to the BBC today, the new prime minister said: ‘I use the study to read quietly most evenings… when there is difficult work to do.
“Actually, it’s not about Margaret Thatcher. I don’t like images or photographs of people staring at me.
“I have encountered it all my life. When I was a lawyer I used to have pictures of judges. I don’t like it. I like landscapes.
“This is my studio, it’s my private place where I work. I didn’t want a photo of anyone.”
Señor Keir faces a major cross-party effort to kill plans to cut winter fuel payments for retirees.
One Labour rebel, York MP Rachael Maskell, has already warned that the decision could lead to “excess deaths” this winter.
And the MP for Canterbury Rosie Duffielda long-time Starmer critic, suggested it would be “disgraceful” for MPs earning £91,346 a year to cut support for older people living on around £13,000 a year.
Up to 30 of her own MPs could ignore threats to strip them of the whip and refuse to back the plan in a Conservative-led vote in the House of Commons on Tuesday. Yesterday, Labour MP Rosie Duffield told Radio 4’s Today programme that she intended to abstain.
Meanwhile, peers are preparing to try to kill the change in the House of Lords, led by former Conservative peer Baroness Altmann, who called it “one of the worst decisions I have ever seen”.
At the same time, the Lords are preparing to try to kill the change in the House of Lords, led by former Conservative peer Baroness Altmann, who called it “one of the worst decisions I have ever seen”.
In response, the Prime Minister said: His government is prepared to be “unpopular” to get things done. He said the previous Conservative administration had “shied away from difficult decisions”.
“I am absolutely convinced that we will achieve that change, I am absolutely determined to do so, if we do the difficult things now. I know they are unpopular, I know they are difficult, of course they are difficult decisions,” he said.
‘But it’s a bit like building a house: if you know the foundation is rotten, if you know there’s damp or cracks, you can paint over it and pretend you’ve got a beautiful new house and within six months it all falls apart.
“Or you can say, ‘Let’s tear it down, let’s fix the foundations,’ and what will happen then, and that’s where the hope is, is that at the end of this term you will have a much better house, a country built to last, and that’s what I’m determined to achieve during the time we have left in office.”
A review by eminent surgeon and independent peer Lord Darzi, to be published on Thursday, is expected to highlight how the health service is failing children.
It is expected to show that 175,000 children are waiting between six months and a year for treatment and 35,000 are waiting longer than a year, the Sunday Times reported.
It will also show that 100,000 babies waited more than six hours to be seen in accident and emergency departments last year, and that waiting times for under-twos have increased by 60 per cent in the past 15 years.
Declining vaccination rates and increases in vaccination rates are also likely to be detected. ADHD medication and in hospital admissions related to eating disorders in children.
The Prime Minister said the health service’s problems were due to “money that was taken from the government.” National Health Service“In particular, in the early years of the coalition, from 2010 onwards, the (Andrew) Lansley reforms, which were desperately wrong. And then, of course, on top of all that, COVID, which has put us in this terrible situation for the NHS.”
A review by eminent surgeon and independent peer Lord Darzi, to be published on Thursday, is expected to highlight how the health service is failing children.
Sir Keir also blamed the previous government for the failings of the NHS, as he did for the UK’s economic situation.
The Prime Minister added: ‘Our job now, through Lord Darzi, is to properly understand how this came about and to bring about the reforms, starting with the first steps, the 40,000 additional appointments.
“But we also have to do the hard work of reform. And, as I say, I believe that only a Labour government can deliver the reform that our NHS needs, and we will take that path.”
Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins has accused Labour of using Lord Darzi’s health review as a “one-off” to raise taxes in the next Budget.
Speaking to Sky News, Ms Atkins said: “As Secretary of State, I was clear that to build an NHS for the next 75 years, we have to combine reform with investment, and I tried to do that through the productivity plans, bringing technology to the frontline of NHS services, which I heard Labour was cancelling.
“What worries me is what we have seen so far from the Secretary of Health, the only thing he has done is give a salary increase to young doctors without any productivity reform.”
