Keir Starmer dealt humiliating blow on GB News: 'It's just theatre!'

Prime minister 's efforts with migration were labelled "theatre" during a scathing interview on . During the breakfast programme, presenters Stephen Dixon and Miriam Cates welcomed Shadow Home Office Minister Katie Lam about his plans to secure the border.

In the wake of , Lam was asked: "We know that the immigration issue is a European-wide problem, the Prime minister's been in Albania, we know that the Italians have a deal with Albania because they have very similar problems to us, also finding huge problems with the ECHR. "Would you be willing to support the Prime minister in getting closer to the EU in order to solve some of the problems?" Lam responded: "I think it depends the price for that, there's a lot of discussion at the moment about a youth mobility scheme, if the EU want to return to anything that looks like free movement, that will make this problem even worse."

Lam continued: "The general problem even worse of how many people are coming here into this country, those people coming illegally rather than legally but the priority has to be to secure the border.

"If the Prime minister is doing the right things to secure the border, I will very, very happily support him at the moment, he's not, it's just theatre."

This came after Starmer announced plans to explore third-country processing sites for who had exhausted all legal routes to remain in Britain, however, Albania swiftly confirmed they would not be part of the proposal.

During a joint press conference in Tirana, Rama said: "We have been asked by several countries if we were open to it, and we said no, because we are loyal to the marriage with Italy, and the rest is just love."

This brutal rejection came just hours after Starmer used an interview with GB News to confirm that the Government had begun talks with unnamed countries about housing migrants awaiting deportation.

He said: "What now we want to do and are having discussions of, talks of, is return hubs, which is where someone has been through the system in the UK, they need to be returned and we have to make sure they're returned effectively and we'll do that, if we can, through return hubs."

Later, Downing Street was forced to clarify that Albania had never been on the list of countries under consideration and that the subject was "never planned as part of discussions" with Mr Rama.

A spokesperson for the Prime minister then claimed the idea of return hubs was not aimed at new arrivals but failed asylum seekers attempting to delay deportation using "tactics" such as destroying paperwork or starting a family.