Starmer, antisemitism czar slam Conservatives for criticizing Labour leader’s vow to spend Friday nights with family

Labour Party leader Keir Starmer speaks during a live TV debate, hosted by The BBC, in Nottingham, on June 26, 2024, in the build-up to the UK general election on July 4. (Phil Noble / POOL / AFP)
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer speaks during a live TV debate, hosted by The BBC, in Nottingham, on June 26, 2024, in the build-up to the UK general election on July 4. (Phil Noble / POOL / AFP)

Keir Starmer, whose Labour Party is widely expected to win tomorrow’s UK election, slams an attack by his Conservative rivals in which they questioned his work ethic over his statement that he intends to continue to spend time with his family on Friday evenings.

Starmer’s wife Victoria is Jewish, and the Labour leader has previously said Friday night dinners are an important tradition in the family.

“They’re just in this negative desperate loop. And it is really desperate. My family’s really important to me as they will be to every single person watching this,” Starmer says, according to The Guardian. “And I just think it’s increasing desperation, bordering on hysterical now.”

On Monday, Starmer said: “We’ve had a strategy in place and we’ll try to keep to it, which is to carve out really protected time for the kids, so on a Friday — I’ve been doing this for years — I will not do a work-related thing after 6 o’clock, pretty well come what may. There are a few exceptions, but that’s what we do.”

In response, the Conservative Party said Starmer would be “a part-time prime minister,” in an attack also slammed by the government’s antisemitism adviser Lord Mann.

“The attack on Keir Starmer for asserting his right to family time on a Friday night, as he has done for many, many years, is so dangerous,” Mann says.

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