Rishi Sunak took a helicopter owned by a millionaire Conservative donor to fly from North Yorkshire to London on Saturday, before appearing at a hastily arranged campaign trip in south London.
The prime minister made two relatively low-key campaign stops during the day, after the Guardian revealed on Friday he was planning to spend the day solely in his constituency and London.
Sunak first had tea with a small group of veterans in a pub in his North Yorkshire constituency for a 20-minute stop during which he did not take questions from the media.
Flight logs show he then flew in the helicopter owned by the entrepreneur Richard Harpin down to London, before posting pictures of himself meeting voters in Wimbledon.
The event had not been advertised the day before, but came after the Guardian reported the prime minister was going to stay away from the campaign trail after a difficult first few days.
Labour on Saturday accused the prime minister of “hiding away in his mansion”. Senior Tories however said the 20-minute breakfast stop in his constituency, where he has a 27,000 majority, showed that he was not taking a day off but instead was leading the campaign “from the front”.
Sunak told the group of veterans on Saturday he was “pumped up” for the campaign. “That’s our tradition – the prime minister, in the big moments, they call the election and they go out there,” he said.
Sunak has previously come under fire for his frequent use of helicopters for trips that could be completed by road or train. Last year the Mirror revealed he had used Harpin’s helicopter to travel to Wrexham on a journey that would have only taken 10 minutes longer by train.
The journey from his house in Northallerton to London would have taken two-and-a-half hours by train. The flight logs show he completed the trip an hour quicker by helicopter, with a short stop in Nottingham in between. It would have caused nearly a tonne of CO2 emissions, according to the aviation research company Conklin & De Decker.
The rapid journey to London and the unannounced campaign stop come after a rocky start for the Conservative election campaign.
The prime minister announced the election in the pouring rain outside Downing Street, where he was all but drowned out by a protester playing the 1997 Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better on a speaker nearby.
after newsletter promotion
He then attended a campaign stop in a factory, where he faced questions from people in high-visibility jackets, two of whom turned out to be Conservative councillors.
Soon after, he asked workers in Wales if they were looking forward to the Euro 2024 football tournament, for which the country’s team has not qualified.
On Friday the prime minister was hit by the news that two of his ministers – Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom – were standing down, with the number of departing Tory MPs reaching 78, breaking the previous record of 1997.
The Conservatives did not respond to a request to comment.