A PHOTO OF Jimmy Saville with a group of children in 1978 has been shared online to falsely claim it shows current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer with the notorious paedophile as a child.

The image has been shared alongside old photos of Starmer to suggest that he has a connection with one of Britain’s most infamous child abusers.

Many of these posts also claim that this somehow implies that Starmer is lenient or sympathetic to perpetrators of such crimes.

These claims are false. The photo, which is publicly available, does not show Starmer.

“Infamous paedophile Jimmy Saville is seen in photo with UK PM Keir Starmer as a child,” Derek Blighe, a far-right activist and failed electoral candidate, said on Instagram on 14 January.

“Is it a coincidence that the left leaning Labour Party has a long list of elected paedophile members when Mr Starmer was exposed to such a monster at a young age?”

The photo of Saville with the child has been recently shared among fringe groups, along with almost identical claims. These claims, however, are false.

The photo was taken in 1978 and appears to show a child who is also about 12.

An accompanying photo of Starmer which was included with such claims comes from a biography of the UK Prime Minister, and is described as showing him in 1974, when he was about 12 years old.

It should be noted that the two children don’t share many features and just generally don’t look alike.

The photo of Saville is described as him visiting disadvantaged children at “Avon Tyrrel House, in the New Forest, Hampshire”.

Starmer grew up in Oxted, Surrey, and would have attended the Reigate grammar school in 1978. Neither of these areas is within 100 kilometers of Avon Tyrrel House.

Last February, Reuters debunked an image that was doctored to show an adult Starmer and Saville sitting next to each other laughing.

However, the original photo showed Starmer with former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown watching the World Cup. 

Spurious attacks on Starmer by international far-right commentators have increased significantly this year, largely spurred by inflammatory and misleading attacks by Elon Musk.

Musk has claimed that Starmer’s government failed to protect children during sexual exploitation scandals (that had occurred under previous governments).

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