Tories are wrong to imply that Starmer is racist

Is it really some kind of underhand racist smear for Labour to claim that Rishi Sunak ‘doesn’t get Britain’? This is the charge being laid by No. 10 staffers at the door of the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, who made the accusation during the first Prime Minister’s Questions of the year on Wednesday.

Claire Coutinho, the Energy Secretary, whose parents came from India in the 1970s, told a radio interviewer that she was prepared to give Starmer the ‘benefit of the doubt’ that the remark ‘wasn’t about race’. She then went on to add that ‘only he can know what he is implying’, while somehow  making it perfectly obvious that there was no real doubt in her mind about what Starmer meant in saying Sunak didn’t ‘get Britain’. In case anyone is in any doubt about what the Conservatives think Starmer is up to, a Downing Street spokesman made things plain enough: ‘I guess what I would say is, you know, the PM’s as British as Starmer.’