Keir Starmer Bets Veteran Mirror Reporter £50 That MP Lee Anderson Will Lose Seat

Veteran Mirror reporter Paul Routledge bet Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer that Reform UK MP and GB News host Lee Anderson will lose his seat at the upcoming general election.

Routledge, part of a press pool speaking with Starmer on Thursday, took the opportunity to place a wager on Anderson’s future after the Labour leader asserted that he’d lose his constituency.

The journalist asked: “Do you think that Lee Anderson will retain his seat?”

“No, I don’t,” Starmer replied.

“Bet on it?” Routledge added.

Stepping forward, Starmer shook the reporter’s hand and warned that he’d just won a bet with another Labour MP: “Although Jonathan Ashworth just lost a tenner to me recently.”

Routledge placed the wager, noting he couldn’t match journalist Piers Morgan’s £1000 figure with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: “I’m a poor man’s Piers [Morgan], so fifty quid.”

Starmer replied in agreement: “Fifty quid.”

The party leader continued, blasting Anderson for his quick transition in recent years to the political right: “But look, he’s drifted from the Labour Party into the Tory party, to the right of the Tory, now out the other door, to the right to Reform [UK]. There is no future in that. And Reform doesn’t provide the answers to the very many challenges that people are facing across the country.

Starmer said that because of this Labour planned “to take him on and beat him.”

He added: “I’m sure we will, because he hasn’t got the answers that the country needs. You can’t run a government, you can’t envisage a future that is just built on: ‘divide, divide, divide.’ And what he said about Islamophobia or his Islamophobic comments are just totally unacceptable. And you saw all the [Frank] Hester stuff last week. They tell a story about a right of politics which is rotten now.”