The Labour leader has denied allegations he branded the prime minister a “stupid woman” during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday.

He insisted he instead referred to “stupid people” in a comment about those “seeking to turn a debate about the national crisis facing our country into a pantomime”.

But, amid a furious political row, lip-readers from 121 Captions have studied the footage of Mr Corbyn and disagreed with the politician’s explanation.

Among their comments, they told Sky News:

• The mouth shows the shape of “Wo” and clearly ends with man. It does not look like “people” at all
• Lips moving forward for “W” is very different from the plosive “P” shape in people
• And, you have to look at the whole phrase anyway. It’s clearly “woman” and what word would use a “P”? “Poman” makes no sense
• Also, look at the first syllable. “Woman” equals “O” and “people” equals “EE”
• The key thing here is the “W” in woman is so easy to see
• Tina Lannin is the director and founder of 121 Captions who previously worked as an expert witness forensic lip reader and a lip-reading teacher.

She also explained how lip readers use a specific alphabet consisting of groups of homophenes – bits of words – that look and sound alike.

One of those groups are the three letters “P”, “B” and “M”, which all look the same. The letter “W” is not in that group but in another group together with “Q”.

In addition, in the next homophene in “woman”, the “M” is in the PBM group as well. The last homophene is N, which is in a homophene group with “T” and “D” as they all look alike.

Ms Lannin said: “P is in PBM group, therefore P can’t be confused with W in ‘woman’. At the end of ‘people’, you have the L. Completely different from the N in woman.”