What was claimed
An audio recording captures the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer saying that he hates Liverpool.
Our verdict
There’s no evidence this is a genuine recording. It was widely reported as a fake when it first appeared in October 2023.
Debunked Keir Starmer audio reappears ahead of Labour conference in Liverpool
On the eve of Labour’s 2025 party conference, a number of posts on Facebook and other social media channels have shared an audio clip which supposedly captures the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer swearing and saying that he hates Liverpool, the city where the event is set to take place.
One such post on X (formerly Twitter) has more than 270,000 views at the time of writing while one posted on TikTok has been seen more than 240,000 times.
In the clip, a voice sounding like that of Mr Starmer is heard to say: “Why do we have to have conference here every single year[…] I f***ing hate Liverpool.”
Labour’s annual party conference has taken place in Liverpool every year since 2022. Versions of this clip have been in circulation since October 2023 but as we’ve explained before and as has been reported in the media elsewhere, there is no evidence that it is genuine.
We’ve not been able to determine whether the clip featuring comments about Liverpool was generated with artificial intelligence, edited in some other way or simply features an impersonator, but we’ve not seen any evidence to suggest it is real.
We’ve seen various suspected deepfake audio clips of other politicians in recent years, including of 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 verify 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.