Starmer Hammered In Brutal PMQs For Giving Peerage To 'Paedophile Apologist'

Keir Starmer was accused of filling his government “with paedophile apologists” by opposition leaders during a brutal prime minister’s questions today.

Starmer’s former comms chief Lord Doyle had the Labour whip removed on Tuesday over his links to a convicted sex offender.

Doyle campaigned for a former Labour councillor, Sean Morton, after he had been charged with child sex offences in 2017.

Though this was reported late last year, the prime minister still promoted his former aide to the upper chamber just two weeks ago.

Doyle’s suspension from Labour comes days after fellow peer, Lord Mandelson, quit the party as the depth of his friendship with convicted padeophile Jeffrey Epstein emerged.

The PM appointed the former Labour grandee to be the UK’s ambassador to the US last year though Mandelson was sacked in September.

The Doyle scandal adds to the mounting public anger over Mandelson, and puts even more pressure on Starmer who is fighting to save his job.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch torched the prime minister over the two incidents in PMQs, saying: “The prime minister is demonstrating catastrophic levels of delusion if he thinks the problem is on this side of the house.”

“He is throwing everyone under the bus except himself. The Mandelson episode was not an isolated incident,” she said.

Starmer insisted that Doyle did not give a full account of his actions, and pointed to the government’s work on violence against women and girls.

When he tried to turn the attention back to the Tories’ own internal struggles, Badenoch said: “We weren’t the ones stuffing government with hypocrites and padeophile apologists.

“He can’t build a team, he has no plan, he can’t even run his own office let alone the country.”

Liberal Democrat Ed Davey took a similar line of attack, telling Starmer: “To appoint one paedophile supporter cannot be excused as misfortune.

“To appoint two shows a catastrophic lack of judgement.”

The prime minister angrily responded by trying to hold Davey to account over austerity, which the Tory-Lib Dem coalition imposed more than a decade ago.

The SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn also took aim at the scandals, saying: “He [Starmer] essentially rolled the same pitch to Matthew Doyle as he did to Mandelson, that they weren’t clear with him.

“He appears to be the most gullible former director of public prosecutions in history.”