Sir Keir Starmer squirmed as he was put on the spot about his plunging approval ratings – telling BBC Breakfast his Government had to take “tough decisions”.
The Prime Minister was grilled by host Charlie Stayt on his unpopularity after his personal rating slumped to -38%.
Sir Keir said: “Firstly, I’ll be judged at the end of the five-year term on whether we’ve delivered what we said we will deliver and that’s all that matters to me.
“That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s why I came into politics, to bring about that change.
“Second thing I’d say is this – we’ve inherited a real mess and we’ve decided to take tough decisions to deal with it, to take it head-on. That £22billion black hole in the economy. I wasn’t prepared to pretend that it wasn’t there.
“We took the tough decisions and that is tough but we did it early.”
The Government has axed the winter fuel payment from up to 10million pensioners since coming into power on July 4.
Ministers have also launched an inheritance tax raid on farmers, produced a £40billion tax-raising Budget and will implement VAT on private school fees from January.
