The prime minister said Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s comments were ‘abhorrent’ and that his return to Britain was a ‘failing within the system’
January 5, 2026 11:04
Sir Keir Starmer has expressed regret that he expressed delight at the release of a British-Egyptian activist whose posts on social media appeared to endorse the murder of Zionists and stated that he disliked white people.
On Boxing Day, the prime minister posted on X that securing Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s release from prison in Egypt was “a top priority for my government since we came to office”.
Since then, el-Fattah’s social media history emerged, resulting in calls for his British citizenship, obtained in 2021 under the previous Conservative government, to be rescinded.
In a wide-ranging interview, which aired on Sunday, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg challenged the prime minister over the affair, asking: “It's almost impossible to understand that no one in the government had bothered to check what he'd [el-Fattah] said before and then that the prime minister of this country says he's delighted to welcome somebody back who'd expressed those views. Are you sorry you did?”
“Well, of course I regret that”, Starmer responded.
He went on to say that the fact he wasn’t informed of el-Fattah’s posts was a failure within government.
“Your point that somebody in government should have known is one I've made myself to the appropriate team because I do think I should have been made aware, and I wasn't made aware, and that is a failing within the system, which is why we're carrying out a review.”
He continued: “It's a failing within the system, it shouldn't have happened, and I wasn't very pleased about it when I found out; hence we're taking remedial action.”
Earlier in the interview, Starmer condemned el-Fattah’s comments as “abhorrent” and insisted that he wasn’t aware of them when he welcomed him to the UK.
However, he attempted to explain the attempts of successive governments to secure his release from Egyptian prison.
“One of the jobs of the British government, all British governments, not just this British government, where someone is being treated in an improper way in another country if they're a British national is to take action to try to alleviate that situation.
"And that's why I acted in this case and actually previous prime ministers have acted in exactly the same way in the actions they took to try to get him released because that's what happens in consular cases.”
El-Fattah was granted British citizenship because his mother, human rights activist Laila Soueif, was born in London, though he himself was born and raised in Cairo.
The Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council had criticised the government for welcoming el-Fattah to the UK, along with the former US antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt.
El-Fattah’s nomination for a European human rights prize, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom, was withdrawn in 2014 over remarks he made on social media in which, the Telegraph reported, he “appeared to call for the deaths ‘of a critical number of Israelis’”.
On Friday, the prime minister’s former director of strategy criticised elements within the civil service for over-prioritising attempts to secure the release of el-Fattah.
Writing for The Times, Paul Ovenden claimed that el-Fattah’s case was “a cause célèbre beloved of Whitehall’s sturdy, clean-shirted diplomats and their scurrying auxiliaries”.
He added: “They mentioned him with such regularity that it became a running joke among my colleagues: a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues.”
The former Number 10 official went on to say that the issue has “revealed the sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time” and was part of a wider issue that he described as what he described as the shifting of power towards what he called the “Stakeholder State”.
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