Rory Stewart condemns Keir Starmer for 'disgusting' policy after Rishi Sunak child abuse attack ads

Speaking at the UKREiiF real estate and investment conference in Leeds on Wednesday morning, Mr Stewart said the implication of Labour's attack ads against the Prime Minister were that Sir Keir's party would ensure substantially more people convicted of child sex crimes were sent to jail.

He said that as a former director of public prosecutions Sir Keir would be well aware that judges had made carefully considered legal decisions that some convictions did not merit jail sentences while the country's prison estate is already dangerously overcrowded.

Labour received criticism last month for a series of attack ads on the Prime Minister, including one which said, ‘Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t’. It added that under the Conservatives, 4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children had served no prison time and Labour would “lock up dangerous child abusers”.

Sir Keir said he stood “by every word” despite criticism from the likes of Labour grandee David Blunkett.

Mr Stewart, a former Prisons Minister, told the audience in Leeds he found Labour’s policy around the rule of law “very, very disturbing”.

He said: “The implication is if Labour came in they would change that and those 4,500 people would get jailed. Now our prisons are entirely overcrowded.

"We have got 82,000 living in prisons built for 65,000. We’ve got people in Victorian cells built for one with two people in them.

"This man was Director of Public Prosecutions. He knows that those people not sent to jail were not sent to jail because judges who had gone into these cases in detail had concluded they did not merit jail sentences.

"It is simply a completely irresponsible criminal justice policy because it is against his entire professional life and education in order to scoop up votes. I think it is disgusting.”

Mr Stewart made the comments as he co-hosted a discussion with his fellow Rest is Politics podcast presenter Alastair Campbell.

Prior to the remarks the pair asked the audience, made up of hundreds of invited property sector professionals and local authority politicians and officers, who they thought would be Prime Minister in two years’ time.

A show of hands revealed the vast majority believed Sir Keir would be PM with just a handful saying they thought it would be Mr Sunak.

But a follow-up question asking who could describe what Keir Starmer’s five missions are saw no hands go up in the audience.

Mr Stewart said: “My anxiety as now a floating voter is we are very very close to the election and two years before the election in 1997, Tony Blair and New Labour were projecting a very clear idea of the kind of Government they were going to run and getting into the details and being quite radical and quite bold. It appears to me that Labour at the moment is following a Ming Vase strategy, trying to carry themselves across the line or signalling what they are going to do.”

Panellist Georgia Gould, Labour leader of Camden Council, said the comparison was unfair.

"Two years before 1997 Labour was in a very different position. Keir had a big job to make the Labour party something anyone would listen to.”

Mr Campbell said that an audience in Harrogate on Tuesday had given a similar response in indicating their general belief Labour will win power but not knowing what they stood for specifically.

He said: “That says to me they think the Tories are terrible and want to get rid of the Tories and that is going to happen but they don’t have a clear sense of what’s going to come. That’s a problem.”

Following a subsequent question from an audience member about what Labour needs to do to create a lasting Government, Mr Campbell said Labour need a clear long-term plan.

"I say to Labour people, ‘What is the number one priority?’. I do it all the time and they say different things, some people say housing, some people say jobs, some say the cost of living.”

He said they should come up with a clear idea of what they want Britain to feel like in a decade’s time.

But Mr Campbell also added: “What I really like about Keir is he is incredibly methodical – step-by-step he has become leader of the Labour party, sorted out the Corbynistas and showed the Tories were useless.”

He said the Labour leader now needed to demonstrate what policy offer he has for voters as the election approaches.