Leeds jeweller says viral Rishi Sunak hammer video came after Prime Minister told to use tool wrong way round

Mr Sunak was in Farsley last week, where he spoke to traders at Sunny Bank Mills about how the government’s autumn budget would affect businesses.

But it was during that visit to the historic mill complex that a particular moment captured people’s attention – and it didn’t involve any of the government’s economic announcements.

A short video of Mr Sunak in the workshop of city-based jeweller Emma White showed the Prime Minister using a hammer. But rather than using the face of the tool as is traditional, he was hammering with its side.

The footage prompted countless jokes as it was suggested that he did not know how to use it. Programmes like Channel 4’s The Last Leg and the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg featured the footage, while the likes of comedian Katherine Ryan shared it with her 900,000 Instagram followers.

The Labour Party was quick to react with a post on X [formerly Twitter] that said: “Man who hammers working people can’t work a hammer.”

But a longer version of the clip proved that Leeds business owner Emma had actually asked the Prime Minister to use the side of the tool.

She joked: “It wasn’t a set up, I’d love to tell you that I was clever enough to think of that.

“The reason I wanted him to use the side of the hammer was because it was quite a nice one – the kind that you wouldn’t normally use for a task like that – and I didn’t have another hammer to hand. I didn’t want to use the face of it.”

After the clip went viral, her phone was flooded with messages.

“People were coming up to me saying, oh my God, you’re all over TikTok. There were all these spoofs that people had made of Rishi doing other things, like trying to eat soup with a fork. It was quite funny.

“I even had someone in Cambodia messaging me. It was everywhere.”

Emma was a runner-up on the popular BBC competition series All That Glitters. Now, she runs regular jewellery-making classes with her business The Jewellery Makers at the Sunny Bank Mills workshop.

While most were amused by last week’s viral clip, Emma revealed that she has had some backlash. That was because some interpreted the Prime Minister’s visit as Emma’s support for his party, which she said is not the case.

“We’ve had Labour’s Rachel Reeves here too,” she explained. “This is a teaching space and I have an open door policy. The criticism has been a bit weird.

“My take on politics is that shutting the door is not the intelligent thing to do when you don’t agree with someone. Democracy is about having conversations.”

Stuart Andrew, the Conservative MP for Pudsey, was also present on the visit. He said that the Prime Minister was “impressed beyond expectations” by what he saw at the hugely popular mill complex.

Meanwhile, Mr Sunak himself told the Yorkshire Evening Post that he is a “big backer” of the city and insisted that a planned mass transit system for the region was “critical”.

He has previously promised that the project would be funded as an alternative to HS2, after plans for high speed rail were scrapped earlier this year.