Keir Starmer crashed a lorry in awkward PR moment and the jokes wrote themselves

Keir Starmer has had a rather unsmooth moment on the road and people are chuckling away.

The leader of the Labour Party was visiting Mantra Learning, a Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) training facility in Oldham, criticising the government for the shortage of lorry drivers which has in turn led to delays in stocking goods in supermarkets and high street chains, when he decided to take the wheel of one of the vehicles himself and go for a spin.

But his attempt to raise awareness about these difficulties and make Johnson’s government look incompetent unfortunately backfired after he crashed the lorry.

The video shows him reversing in the car park. The instructor then urges him to “go left” but as he does so he crashes into the kerb behind him and is told he would have failed if it was a real test. “Very good,” he replies.

Responding to the video, people found it funny and many remarked that the teacher’s request to “go left” is something those on the left of the Labour Party desire in political terms, too.

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Others said the “car crash” could be seen as a metaphor for his leadership:

And others compared him to Alan Partridge and another gaffe-prone former Labour leader, Ed Miliband:

During his visit, Starmer slammed the government for its handling of the supply-chain crisis. He said: “We need to get drivers back on the road just as quickly as possible because we’ve seen already the impact on fuel in recent weeks.

“Now we’re seeing the impact in deliveries and this is going to go on for weeks and months into Christmas.

“And I think everybody will be saying we need to do something about it, we need to get that training in place.

“But for heaven’s sake, this was predicted, it was absolutely foreseeable, and the Government hasn’t responded.

“We knew when we left the EU that we would need to have a plan B in relation to drivers, we knew because of the pandemic there would be an impact, and here we are in the middle of a crisis and we’ve got, what? A Prime Minister who’s missing in action.”

As for his lorry driving, he said: “Well, it’s a big beast, is the lorry, but it was really interesting to drive it.

“I’m not sure that I’ll be driving to Tesco later on this afternoon to do the deliveries.”

Quite.