Keir Starmer made a very unfortunate slip-up during his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference on Tuesday.
During a sincere moment where he called for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Gaza – triggering a wave of loud cheering from the huge crowd – he also called for the “return of the sausages”.
Yes, rather than calling for the Israeli hostages to be released from Hamas’ captivity, the prime minister landed on “sausages”.
Here’s the exact moment where you can see him pause, realise his error a moment later, and try to subtly correct it – as subtly as you can while speaking on stage to almost every delegate at his own party’s conference.
Forget throwing some red meat to your own backbenchers – what about throwing some bangers to your critics?
Perhaps he was recalling Liz Truss’s infamous shout-out to pork markets at the 2014 Conservative Party conference at the time.
Either way, it’s definitely not the moment he would have wanted to be remembered from the first Labour conference where they are in government in 15 years.
But it doesn’t look like keen listeners on social media are likely to let it slide anytime soon….
Away from that rather memorable blunder, Starmer tried to use his speech to quell criticism coming from the left of his party, claiming: “It’s never distracted me before, and it won’t distract me now.”
He said “bad faith advice” was water off a duck’s back, or “merely glitter on a shirt cuff”, alluding to last year’s conference speech when a protester covered him with the decoration.
He promised the change Labour would introduce to Britain would “mean nothing less than national renewal”.
