Thread by @alexnunns

Update on Keir's honour & integrity. He's now fibbing about previous fibs.

He told @AndrewMarr9 his broken pledges were overridden by a promise of a "laser-like" focus on winning which he made in his closing speeches at leadership hustings.

Turns out that's not true either! >>

It's daft to claim he was elected on the basis of one point he made at hustings events rather than on his campaign pledges, but anyway, he didn't even make it!

I've checked his closing speeches from six of the 2020 hustings and in none of them does he say what he now claims.

Here's what Keir said to Marr:

"About those pledges... we went through the hustings [in 2020]... everybody at every hustings had a closing speech and my closing speech was the same every single time which was: if we don't win, all the things that all the candidates are saying...

...will never come to pass. So I made it clear that anyone voting for me as leader of the Labour Party would have someone who was laser-like focused on winning an election. That was my pitch to our Labour Party members."

Here's his 3 min closing speech from the first hustings in Liverpool. He didn't talk about a laser-like focus on winning above all else. Instead, he said: "Another future is possible but only if we fight for it." 🤔

In Bristol a couple of weeks later he did say he was in politics to change lives and we don't achieve that by losing an election, but then said "that doesn't mean ditching the radicalism of the last five years, it means building on it."

In Cardiff, as elsewhere, he mentioned losing the 2019 election as part of an appeal for unity going forward, not in order to say winning must be prioritised above candidates' policy pledges, as he claimed to Marr. They're completely different "pitches."

At the Newsnight hustings, he said he came into politics to change lives and you can't do that from opposition, but again, this was said as an argument for unity, not ditching policies:


Same story in Glasgow:

Even by the final hustings in Dudley, there was no laser-like focus on winning. The idea of a trade-off between power and policies is something he has come up with recently, to justify brazenly breaking his own pledges.

I like this bit:

"There is a choice. We can take lumps out of each other... being factional, divisive... and if we go on like that we will lose the next election. Or we can... recognise that with so many thousand members we're unstoppable when we're united."

He made a choice.