An audio recording captures the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer saying he hates Liverpool.
There’s no evidence this is a genuine audio recording. It first circulated in October 2023 and was widely reported as fake at the time. It may have been created by artificial intelligence, though we don’t know that for sure.
An audio clip that has recently been shared on Facebook supposedly captures the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer swearing and saying he hates Liverpool. This audio has been circulating online since 2023—but there’s no evidence it is a real recording.
In the clip, a voice that sounds like that of Mr Starmer can be heard saying: “Yeah it was the same last year, or not last year, when was it? Honestly one of them was out f***ing side, shouting at me that I’m a Tory, why do we have to have conference here every single year. I f***ing hate Liverpool.”
A post of the audio shared over 1,700 times on X (formerly Twitter) says: “Keir Starmer hates Liverpool,” while another shared on Facebook is captioned: “Starmer hates Liverpool ! So dont vote labour [sic]”.
But there’s no evidence this is genuine audio of Mr Starmer. The clip was first shared in October 2023—while Labour’s annual party conference was being held in Liverpool—and was widely reported to be fake at the time.
While there’s no evidence that it’s real, it can be hard to definitively prove audio clips are fake, especially without any identifiable background noise or specific names that can help to verify it—as is true for this. It’s possible the clip was generated with artificial intelligence, but it’s also possible it was faked in another way, for example having been edited or using an impersonator. We’ve not seen any evidence to suggest it is real.
We’ve written before about another audio clip supposedly of Mr Starmer verbally abusing and swearing at his staff that was shared during Labour’s autumn 2023 conference in Liverpool. Sources within the Labour party confirmed the clip was fake. At least two Conservative politicians also said the clip was a deepfake, including Tom Tugendhat MP, although he did not respond when we asked what his assessment was based on
We’ve written about suspected deepfake audio clips of other politicians before, including the health secretary Wes Streeting, the Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan and former US President Joe Biden. There’s no evidence that any of these were real recordings of the politicians in question.
We’ve written a guide about how we fact check deepfakes and the challenges of doing this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because there’s no evidence this is a real recording of Mr Starmer.
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