A screenshot shows the front page of the Daily Mail published on 4 January, which featured a picture of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile together.
The front page has been edited to include this picture, which wasn’t published by the Daily Mail. It is likely a digital creation, possibly created by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
A Daily Mail front page that includes a picture seemingly showing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer with serial sex offender Jimmy Savile has been circulating on Facebook—but the real cover didn’t feature such an image.
Posts on Facebook, as well as on Threads and X (formerly Twitter) have shared what appears to be a Daily Mail front page from 4 January with the headline: “Starmer ‘guilty as anyone’ over grooming gangs.”
The lead image on the front page appears to be a black and white photograph of the Prime Minister with Savile, a TV personality star who, it emerged after his death, sexually abused hundreds of children and adults at locations including hospitals, schools and the BBC.
The picture appears to show them in the same room.
The Daily Mail did publish an article with this headline on 4 January, but the front page has been edited, and this image has been added in.
Real front covers of the Daily Mail that day do not feature the image in any edition. One front page of the Daily Mail on 4 January included an image of darts champion Luke Littler.
The second edition on the same day, also published in the Scottish Daily Mail, featured an image of the late television presenter Caroline Flack.
When contacted by Full Fact, a spokesperson for the paper confirmed the image of Mr Starmer and Savile was “not published by the Daily Mail”.
And the picture itself is also not a real image of the men together, but may have been created with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Reverse image searches for the picture do not produce any matching results.
Another clue that the image is not genuine is that the picture of Mr Starmer appears to be recent—despite the Labour politician being 49 when Savile died in 2011.
This is not the first time we have fact checked misleading content about Mr Starmer and Savile, having previously debunked a faked image of the pair together and a deepfake of the Prime Minister saying claims against the paedophile “felt slightly frivolous”.
It’s important to consider whether content you see on social media is genuine before sharing it to others. Our guides to spotting misleading and AI-generated images can help you do 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 missing context because this front page has been edited, and the image of Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile wasn’t on this Daily Mail cover.
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