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Rishi Sunak trolled as people realise he was 18 when Sky was widely available in UK

Published 17:19 12 Jun 2024 BST

Updated 10:15 13 Jun 2024 BST

Ryan Price
Rishi Sunak trolled as people realise he was 18 when Sky was widely available in UK

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‘We went without all sorts of things – famously Sky TV’

Rishi Sunak is being trolled online for claiming he was deprived of Sky TV as a child.

The Prime Minister named the expensive television service as one of the main sacrifices his parents had to make when he was growing up, however, people on social media have been quick to point out that the service wasn't widely available in the UK until Sunak was in his late teens.

Although Sky was formed in 1989, it was extremely rare to find a home with access to its multitude of channels until the mid to late 90's.

It is estimated that, by 1992, Sky TV was only available to around one in every fifty Brits.

It wasn't until around 1998, after the considerable boom of the Premier League, that the service reached even 10% of the population.

By this point, Sunak was already an 18-year-old on his way to university.

The question was put to him in an interview with ITV, which Sunak infamously took part in instead of staying in Normandy for the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations last week.

The Conservative Leader was asked by Paul Brand what he does in his day-to-day life to make sure he’s “still in touch with the kind of struggles ordinary people face” and whether he had “ever gone without something.”

Responding, Sunak said his family emigrated to the UK “with very little” and he was raised with the values of “hard work.”

Brand asked again for an example of something he went without as a child, to which Sunak replied: “I went without lots of things because my parents wanted to put everything into our education.”

And when pressed once more for a specific example, the prime minister said: “All sorts of things! Like lots of people, there are all sorts of things that I wanted as a kid that I couldn’t have – famously Sky TV! That was something that we never had growing up actually.”

He added: “My experience is obviously going to be what my experience was. What is more important is my values and how I was raised and I was raised in a household where hard work was really important, you had to work very hard and family was important, service to your community was important.”

Sunak was immediately slammed by some for his response, with many seeing the comments as another example of him being out of touch.

They then doubled down when someone pointed out that Sky TV wasn't common in the UK until Sunak was almost a grown man.

Sunak was born on May 12 1980, meaning he would have been just eight-years-old when Sky TV first launched, but he would have been much older by the time it was in homes around the country.

This seems to have amused a lot of social media users who took to Twitter to revel in Sunak's mistake.

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