Fact check: The Prime Minister and the Army both celebrated Mother’s Day
A series of posts on social media have criticised the Prime Minister and the British Army for posting about the Muslim festival Eid rather than talking about Mother’s Day.
One post said: “In this country today is Mother’s Day. Instead you’re marking (Islam)” in response to a post by Sir Keir Starmer.
Another – which did not mention Eid – said: “Knowing how important our mothers are to us & Mothering Sunday being a British tradition, for Kier (sic) Starmer not to mention it whatsoever & acknowledge how precious it is, makes me loathe him more than I ever thought possible.”
A third social media user responded to the British Army’s post about the “dedication of our Muslim personnel” by saying: “There are fewer that 450 Muslims in the British Army … but every soldier has a mother. That would have been a better post, Happy Mother’s Day.”
Both Sir Keir and the British Army posted about Mother’s Day over the weekend.
Sir Keir Starmer did not appear to post anything about Mother’s Day on social media platform X, however on Instagram the Prime Minister put up a post with a photograph of him with his parents and his wife.
The caption read: “Thinking of my late mum today, who so influenced me as I was growing up; and thinking of my wife Vic, who is the rock of our family … Happy Mother’s Day.”
To find the exact time of an Instagram post, when using the Chrome web browser, you can right-click anywhere on the page then click “view page source”. Then on the page that appears search for “taken_at” and next to that there should be a number.
This number – which is a timestamp – can be translated into a time and date using a tool such as Epochconverter.
In this case the number for Sir Keir’s post was 1743318051.
That shows it was uploaded to Instagram at just before 8.01am on Sunday. The two posts that criticised Sir Keir for not talking about Mother’s Day were uploaded after his Instagram post – one at 8.52am and the other at 8.54pm.
The Army had also posted about Mother’s Day before it posted about Eid. The Eid post was at 11.10am while the Mother’s Day post came at 10.05am on Sunday. They can be seen next to each other on the Army’s X page.
Post from Sir Keir Starmer on X (archived)
Post from Sir Keir Starmer on Instagram (archived)
Archived screenshot of the timestamp on Sir Keir’s Instagram post
British Army post about Mother’s Day (archived)
British Army post about Eid (archived)
British Army page on X (archived)