Is Rishi Sunak being unfairly hammered over his DIY skills?

A video of the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak using the side of a hammer while on a visit to Farsley, West Yorkshire has been getting a pretty high number of views on social media, after it was included in an ITV News broadcast yesterday.

Among those posting about it on X (formerly Twitter) was the Labour Party, which shared a video captioned: “Man who hammers working people can’t work a hammer”. 

However, in a longer clip shared by a BBC political correspondent that includes the moments before Mr Sunak began hammering, the woman he’s sitting alongside can be heard telling Mr Sunak to use “this bit” of the hammer and gesturing at the hammer’s edge.

Mr Sunak asks the woman: “Sideways?”. She replies: “Yeah”. 

After Conservative party chair Richard Holden MP commented on Labour’s “mistake” highlighting the clip, Labour posted again saying: “Urgent correction: man who hammers working people uses hammer as instructed.” 

We’ve asked Labour and Number 10 for comment. 

At Full Fact, we sometimes see videos or images of politicians taken out of context, edited or miscaptioned—for example, we recently fact checked an edited image of the Prime Minister pouring a pint of beer. We also found last month that an image of Mr Sunak shared on his official X account hadn’t been altered as some critics claimed.