Tories demand Boris withdraws Jimmy Savile ‘slur’ at Keir Starmer

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Boris Johnson today batted away calls to withdraw his Jimmy Savile ‘slur’ at Keir Starmer despite the furious Labour leader calling on Tory MPs to oust him for ‘parroting the conspiracy theories of of violent fascists’.

Mr Johnson refused to back down during brutal exchanges at PMQs over his jibe that Sir Keir ‘spent most of his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile‘ when he was head of the CPS.

The attack line has fuelled mounting disquiet among Tory MPs, who fear Mr Johnson overstepped the mark.

Former minister Tobias Ellwood became the latest to declare no confidence in the premier, after it emerged Partygate police are investigating six lockdown-busting bashes that he allegedly attended. His maverick ex-aide Dominic Cummings has upped the ante by claiming there are photographs.    

Sir Keir went over the premier’s head this afternoon reminding Tories that they are the ‘party of Winston Churchill’. 

‘I just want to say to the members opposite, theirs is the party of Winston Churchill,’ he said.

‘Our parties stood together as we defeated fascism in Europe. 

Now their leader stands in the House of Commons parroting the conspiracy theories of violent fascists to try and score cheap political points. 

‘He knows exactly what he is doing, it is time to restore some dignity.’  

But Mr Johnson insisted: ‘I don’t want to make heavy weather of this but I am told that in 2013, he apologised and took full responsibility for what had happened on his watch. I think that was the right thing to do.’ 

The defiant stance came despite evidence that the extraordinary attack line might have backfired. 

Senior Conservative MP Simon Hoare said today that ‘the Jimmy Savile false allegation should be withdrawn’. 

Yesterday former chief whip Julian Smith called on the PM to withdraw the ‘false and baseless’ attack.

‘The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Savile yesterday is wrong and cannot be defended,’ he said. 

‘It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust and can’t just be accepted as part of the cut and thrust of parliamentary debate.’ 

One former minister told MailOnline that many were now convinced that Mr Johnson cannot change.

‘The lawyers in the party say he is incorrect,’ the MP said. ‘I understand they practised this in No10 and he was told ”don’t go there”. A number of colleagues are saying this just won’t work. He freelances and you cannot control that.’   

In a round of interviews this morning, Cabinet minister Michael Gove gave the premier limited support saying he did not need to apologise.  

But he said he ‘respected’ Sir Keir’s position. ‘In a uniquely sensitive case Keir Starmer acknowledged that mistakes had been made by the organisation of which he was head. To his credit he was very clear about those mistakes,’ he told Sky News.

‘He brought in an independent lawyer to look at that. And I think that we should recognise that in doing that he did the right thing.’

Deputy PM Dominic Raab also seemed uncomfortable about the row yesterday, saying he could not ‘substantiate’ the swipe. 

Sir Keir accused Mr Johnson of ‘going so low’ with the claim and accused him of repeating ‘a ridiculous slur peddled by right wing trolls’ who claimed he personally took the decision not to put Savile in the dock in 2009.

A 2013 QC-led inquiry found the decision was made by police and prosecutors locally and the now Labour leader was not personally to blame.

The CPS confirmed at the time there was ‘no reference to any involvement from the DPP in the decision-making within a report examining the case’.  

But an ally of Mr Johnson last night said: ‘Ministers are routinely criticised for things in their departments that they are not personally responsible for.’ 

They also pointed to how Sir Keir issued an apology in January 2013 following a review. ‘I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for the shortcomings in the part played by the CPS in these cases,’ he had said.

On another breathless day of political intrigue: 

Pictures exist of Mr Johnson at Downing Street parties being investigated by police, his former adviser Dominic Cummings claimed during an online Q&A;Top civil servant Antonia Romeo is reported to be snubbing a job as the head of a new Prime Minister’s Office being set up by Mr Johnson; Mr Gove risked a split with Mr Johnson by insisting Keir Starmer ‘did the right thing’ on Jimmy Savile when he was head of the CPS, although he stressed the PM does not need to apologise;  White House press secretary Jen Psaki mocked Mr Johnson saying Joe Biden has ‘never been ambushed by a cake’ as she responded to a question on the lockdown-breaching parties at Downing StreetTV channels in Russia seized on the furore saying Mr Johnson is ‘the most disliked, disrespected and ridiculed character in Britain’ who was ‘completely under the control and heel of his young wife’ Carrie;

The PM’s press secretary, asked by reporters whether the Prime Minister ‘still believes’ Sir Keir acted ‘improperly’ while director of public prosecutions, said: ‘On that, we were simply pointing out Sir Keir Starmer’s record as leader.

‘You’ve got what the Prime Minister said today, which is that in 2013 Keir Starmer apologised and took full responsibility for what happened on his watch, and that that was the right thing to do.’

Pushed on whether Mr Johnson was confident he was not fuelling ‘conspiracy theories of violent fascists’ – as Sir Keir called the claim in the Commons – his spokeswoman said: ‘It is all entirely a matter of public record about what happened at the time and Sir Keir Starmer’s apology at the time is a matter of public record – you can find it for yourself online.’

Nicola Sturgeon has also piled into the row by comparing Mr Johnson to Donald Trump. 

The SNP leader said: ‘I’m of a different political party to Keir Starmer, but the Jimmy Savile comments about Keir Starmer were utterly despicable.

‘(It is) appalling that the holder of the office of Prime Minister is behaving in that fake news, Trumpian manner.

‘This is about the integrity of our democracy.

‘We’ve all got to ask ourselves… as citizens, are we content to have someone with no integrity and no shame occupying Number 10, and I think the answer to that question for the vast majority of people across the UK is no.

‘But the people who can make the decision about whether Boris Johnson stays there or not are Tory MPs and the longer they allow him to stay there, the longer he will become tarnished and tainted and complicit in his conduct.’

Victims of Savile have called for Mr Johnson to withdraw his ‘flippant’ attack on the Labour leader. 

The women said they were left ‘furious’ by his comments in the House of Commons that ‘triggered all the flashbacks’.     

Miss A, a Savile victim, told LBC: ‘To have the PM say this… I was furious . It was like he was using it as a flippant thing for other people’s purposes.

She added: ‘It triggered all the flashbacks, the memories. I can’t begin to tell you how upset I was. It was so unnecessary.’

A lawyer who represented some of the victims said they had called for the PM to withdraw him comments.

Richard Scorer, head of abuse and public inquiries at law firm Slater and Gordon, said: ‘I echo the widespread disgust at what we saw and heard in the House of Commons yesterday as Boris Johnson tried to distract from the Sue Gray update.

‘As one of the lawyers who represented many of Savile’s victims, I can confirm that these allegations against Sir Keir Starmer are completely unfounded and unjustified.

‘Sir Keir did more than any other director of public prosecutions to advance the rights of victims. No DPP can control every decision.

‘The Crown Prosecution Service was much better under his leadership.

‘Victims of Savile I have spoken with today have told me that they want Johnson to withdraw these comments and apologise and I call upon him to do that right away.’

Mr Johnson’s spokesman said ‘the Prime Minister stood by what he said in the House’ – but declined to repeat his claim.

He said: ‘As a civil servant it wouldn’t be right for me to repeat something which relates to a political aspect of the Prime Minister’s work.’

A Tory source told the Sun: ‘As leader of the organisation at the time, what action did he take against people who were personally responsible?’ 

Yesterday Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle said ‘procedurally nothing disorderly’ occurred when Boris Johnson made the claims, but told MPs: ‘I am far from satisfied that the comments in question were appropriate on this occasion.’

Labour’s leader has insisted he did not help the Top of the Pops presenter avoid trial when he was director of public prosecutions in 2009, telling Good Morning Britain: ‘It’s a slur. It’s untrue. It’s desperate from the Prime Minister’. 

Sir Keir told Sky News yesterday that when Mr Johnson mentioned Savile during the debate on Sue Gray’s Partygate report, Tory MPs had a look of ‘disgust’ on their faces. 

‘It is a ridiculous slur peddled by right-wing trolls’, he said.

‘I saw the faces of the Conservative MPs, the disgust on their faces that their Prime Minister was debasing himself by sinking so low in the Chamber was clear. 

‘They knew that he was going so low with that slur, with that lie – he had been advised not to do it because it’s obviously not true, but he does it because he doesn’t understand what honesty and integrity means.’   

The Crown Prosecution Service was eviscerated for failing to get justice for Savile’s 500-plus victims, but a later inquiry found that the decision was made by police and prosecutors locally, not Sir Keir personally. 

Following a 2013 inquiry that cleared him of wrongdoing, Mr Starmer apologised and called it a ‘watershed moment’ for the CPS, who had failed to question the motives and professionalism of the police officers who told them not to pursue Savile.

Mr Johnson’s deputy Dominic Raab struggled to back his boss in a series of uncomfortable interviews yesterday. 

Asked if he would withdraw Mr Johnson’s Savile claim, Mr Raab told Times Radio: ‘It’s not for me to do that. What I would say is it’s part of the cut and thrust in the Chamber.’ 

When questioned by the BBC’s Nick Robinson on whether it was fair, Mr Raab  said: ‘I can’t substantiate that’, adding: ‘I’m certainly not repeating it’. 

Tory MP Julian Smith, the party’s former chief whip, turned on his party leader suggesting the PM should go back to the Commons to withdraw it. 

He tweeted: ‘The smear made against Keir Starmer relating to Jimmy Savile yesterday is wrong & cannot be defended. It should be withdrawn. False and baseless personal slurs are dangerous, corrode trust & can’t just be accepted as part of the cut & thrust of parliamentary debate’. 

Mr Johnson made the comments in the House of Commons on Monday as he hit back at Labour criticism over the Sue Gray report.

The Prime Minister said: ‘The report does absolutely nothing to substantiate the tissue of nonsense that he has said. Absolute nonsense.

‘Instead this leader of the opposition, a former director of public prosecution – who used his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can see – he chose to use this moment to continually pre-judge a police inquiry.

‘He has reached his conclusions about it. I am not going to reach any conclusions and he would be entirely wrong to do so.

‘I have complete confidence in the police, I hope that they will be allowed simply to get on with their job and don’t propose to offer any more commentary about it and I don’t believe that he should either.’ 

Police officers who interviewed Jimmy Savile in 2009 over child sex abuse allegations had actively discouraged the Crown Prosecution Service from pursuing the case.

The former BBC DJ, who died two years later, was interviewed under caution by Surrey Police at Stoke Mandeville Hospital after a woman claimed she had been abused as a girl at Duncroft Approved School for Girls in Staines in the 1970s.

Nine days after the interview, which took place in Savile’s own office in the hospital – police advised prosecutors not to pursue Savile. Police also failed to pursue credible claims against him across the country. 

Nazir Afzal, a former chief Crown prosecutor for the North West, responded to Mr Johnson’s comments by saying that the reference made to Savile by Mr Johnson was ‘a disgrace to Parliament & office of Prime Minister’.

He wrote on Twitter: ‘Its not true. I was there. Keir Starmer had nothing to do with the decisions taken. On the contrary, He supported me in bringing 100s of child sex abusers to justice.’ 

In 2020, fact checking charity Full Fact looked into the claim that Sir Keir had stopped Savile being charged in 2009.

Full Fact said Sir Keir was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) when the decision not to prosecute Savile was made on the grounds of ‘insufficient evidence’, adding: ‘The allegations against Savile were dealt with by local police and a reviewing lawyer for the CPS.

‘A later investigation criticised the actions of both the CPS and the police in their handling of the situation.

‘It did not suggest that Mr Starmer was personally involved in the decisions made.’ 

The independent fact-checking organisation concluded: ‘Mr Starmer was head of the CPS when the decision was made not to prosecute Savile but he was not the reviewing lawyer for the case.

‘An official investigation commissioned later by Starmer criticised both prosecutors and police for their handling of the allegations.’

Another report found: ‘There is no evidence to suggest Sir Keir Starmer, then DPP of the CPS, was directly involved in the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile.’

Savile died in 2011 aged 84 having never been brought to justice for his crimes.

He is now believed to be one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders.

A 2016 report into his abuse found staff at the BBC missed numerous opportunities to stop him.