Labour’s attack on Sunak is as bad as the Jimmy Savile slur used against Starmer

This type of gutter politics isn’t tough. It is an admission of weakness

If the Conservatives had put out a poster saying Keir Starmer doesn’t think “adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison”, Labour people would have hit the roof.

We know this because that is roughly what Boris Johnson did say, when he accused Starmer, formerly the director of public prosecutions, of “failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”. That was a deliberate slur, and this is no better.

The Labour Party posted a graphic on its official Twitter account, which showed a photo of the prime minister and asked: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually abusing children should go to prison?” It answered its own question with the statement, “Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” His signature was added to it, mimicking the Conservatives’ own publicity.

The graphic purported to back up its claim by saying: “Under the Tories, 4,500 adults convicted of assaulting children under 16 served no prison time.” In other words, these figures go back to 2010, when Sunak wasn’t even an MP. There must have been adults convicted of similar offences under the last Labour government, and unless there is an implausibly dramatic change in the law, there are likely to be some cases under any future Labour government.

The party cites “Ministry of Justice data”, but tells us nothing about the nature of the cases that independent judges decided didn’t meet the threshold for a custodial sentence.

(Labour Party)

Unusually, Labour was bombarded with messages on Twitter from party members urging it to delete the graphic. Partisanship is often so strong on social media that supporters of a party will judge its own output by a different standard, or make excuses for it. On this occasion, the party has stooped so low that even its most enthusiastic followers cannot back it.

I couldn’t find any comments saying “Johnson did it to us; we should give as good as we get,” or “We must be as cynical in our cause as they are in theirs.” There didn’t even appear to be any more subtle defences, of the sort that might admit that the attack had made Labour supporters feel uncomfortable while welcoming the fact that it had at least achieved “cut-through”.

Doing the media rounds on Friday, Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, said of the post: “What I stand by is what that graphic is trying to show, which is that the prime minister of our country is responsible for the criminal justice system of our country, and currently that criminal justice system is not working.”

When I have spoken to Labour staff recently, they have complained that they cannot get the media to cover their initiatives. For example, Starmer gained few headlines for his recent campaign against antisocial behaviour, whereas the prime minister got “blanket coverage” of his announcements, they say – most of which directly copied Labour’s ideas from a few days earlier.

However, such frustrations do not justify the low politics of using the emotive subject of child sexual abuse in such a misleading and hypocritical way. Starmer’s admirers praise his ruthlessness, and say that he is much tougher than his critics think. But this attack, which he must have approved, isn’t tough. It is an admission of weakness. By publishing it, Starmer is in effect saying that Johnson was entitled to use the Jimmy Savile slur against him.

Savile wasn’t prosecuted while Starmer was in charge of the Crown Prosecution Service, meaning that the words Johnson used in that disgraceful session of Prime Minister’s Questions were factually accurate. But the implication was as offensive as it was clear.

The same applies to this attack on Sunak. Nobody thinks that the prime minister is responsible for decisions made by the courts up to 12 years before he took office, and it is offensive to imply that he doesn’t care about crimes committed against children. On this occasion, the Labour Party has got it wrong.