Sir Keir Starmer has called the government minister Johnny Mercer a “silly sod” who will “soon be history” in politics after he compared Labour’s new 25-year-old MP to a character from the teen sitcom The Inbetweeners.
The minister for veterans’ affairs said Keir Mather had been “dropped into” the Selby and Ainsty constituency and was an “identikit Labour politician”. Earlier he had said: “[Parliament] mustn’t become a repeat of The Inbetweeners.”
Mather will become the youngest MP in the Commons after overturning a 20,137 Conservative majority to win the North Yorkshire seat for Labour.
The Labour leader derided Mercer’s remarks on Friday as he celebrated the party’s byelection victory alongside Mather and deputy leader Angela Rayner.
On the pitch at Selby Town Football Club, Starmer told the new MP: “There was some silly sod on the radio, on the television last night saying you were ‘only’ 25.”
The comments were picked up by an ITV camera crew and the Labour leader can be heard saying: “But the answer is, you’re 25 and you’ve made history and he’s whatever age he is and he’ll soon be history.”
The Inbetweeners, which aired in the late 2000s on Channel 4, followed four hapless adolescent friends at school who end up in awkward and embarrassing situations.
Explaining his comments to Sky News, Mercer, 41, said: “I think this [is] synthetic outrage, [an] identikit Labour politician is the opposite of what people like me came into politics for.
“[Mather has] been at Oxford University more than he’s had a job, right? So if you can really apply that to the empathy required to understand what it’s really like in this country at the moment, in terms of the cost of living and all these experiences of these people he’s trying to represent.
“Personally, I don’t think that is conducive to good electoral representation and I’m more than entitled to have that view.”
The Labour peer Jenny Chapman, who appeared alongside Mercer on Sky, defended Mather as “very considered” and “intelligent”.
Lady Chapman added: “You’re entitled to have whatever view you like, but there is such a thing as being gracious in defeat, Johnny, and you’re being disrespectful to the voters of Selby who’ve made a decision that you don’t happen to like.
“One of the good things about our parliament is that we have people entering parliament for the first time in their 20s but also in their 60s, from all kinds of backgrounds, and I think that’s a strength.”
Historically, it is not unusual for politicians to start Commons careers in their mid-20s. The prime ministers William Gladstone and Winston Churchill became MPs at the ages of 22 and 25 respectively.
