Keir starmer

Next week, when Keir Starmer appears on stage at Labour conference in Brighton, it will be the first time he has spoken to a packed crowd of party members since he became leader. Covid restrictions meant his inaugural leader’s speech at party conference in September 2020 was delivered to an empty hall and shared via a video link. It was a blessing in disguise. Starmer had an excuse for failing to make much of an impression. He was also able to deliver criticism of the Jeremy Corbyn era without fear of boos from the delegates. His audience will be less forgiving now. Over the past year, his position as Labour

Sir Keir Starmer is holding talks with the Labour-affiliated trade unions today as he tries to change the way his party elects its leaders. He’s hoping that he will get the backing of Unison, Usdaw and the GMB, which party sources say will then unlock the support of his deputy Angela Rayner. Starmer didn’t share his plans to shake up the party’s voting system – by returning it to the electoral college rather than one member, one vote (OMOV) – with Rayner before he announced it to the shadow cabinet yesterday. So far the reaction has been as noisy as Starmer presumably planned it to be. The left of Labour

The last few months have been a period of change for SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford. The waistcoat-wearing MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber placed one of his two Skye homes on sales for £400,000 and quit his £39,000-a-year directorship of Golden Charter – the investment firm which gets its money from pre-paid funeral plans. The company caused Blackford a fair amount of embarrassment last year after it was revealed to have bemoaned how ‘excess deaths’ caused by Covid meant it had to hand over more than usual to cover the costs of customers’ funerals and cremations. Classy. Now such Gordon Gekko antics are behind the former investment banker. Instead, Blackford has returned to reiterating his claims

What were they? Model broomsticks? Mini cricket bats? The chewed ends of lolly-sticks? At PMQs today many MPs arrived with odd sprigs of material attached to their clothing. The badges turned out to be ‘wheat-pins’ which are part of ‘Back British Farming Day’. Sir Keir Starmer had attached his device firmly to his jacket. Very sensible. Boris had lazily shoved the thing into his breast pocket. It slowly descended into the depths of the lining and disappeared. The session began sombrely as members expressed their sympathy with Boris over his recent bereavement. Sir Keir Starmer took just three seconds to turn it into a story about himself. ‘I offer my

PMQs thundered back to life today. Boris was clearly thrilled to be there. Sir Keir seemed to be up to his eyeballs in self-doubt.  Evidently the Labour leader preferred the old pandemic days when the chamber was like a coroner’s court or a half-empty library at Lambeth Palace. The atmosphere back then was calm, studious and considered. This afternoon the playground riot was in full swing. It opened with a Boris special. He was asked by Craig MacKinlay if the next generation could seriously rely on cars powered by Duracell batteries and by houses heated with warm zephyrs that rise by magic through air-vents in the floor. Boris crushed this cynical

Which Boris Johnson should Labour fight? There is little doubt about the personality traits most left-wing activists think they have detected in the Prime Minister and which motivate them to campaign tirelessly for his removal from office. The Johnson they are fighting is a cruel and dastardly right-wing serial liar who wins elections by pulling the wool over the eyes of the voters. A British Trump, in other words. One social media activist is very proud that his video of the PM ‘lying’ to the Commons and elsewhere has 32 million views. But one wonders how many of those views came from people who were not already convinced Boris-haters? In

In a recent interview Keir Starmer dropped the B-bomb and Labour members are all a chatter about what it means. Speaking to the Financial Times the Labour leader said his party should be ‘very proud’ of what it achieved under Blair and Brown. As part of Labour’s campaign to regain power for the first time since 2010, Starmer believes the party should remind voters of the good it did when in government, and point out Labour’s successes in reducing poverty, improving the prospects of children and tackling climate change. This might seem a reasonable thing for the Labour leader to say. But for some on the far left of the

The morass of flooding politics have claimed a fair few scalps over the years. Those with long memories will recall the struggles of former Culture Secretary Chris Smith, whose lacklustre tenure as chair of the Environment Agency was ended ignominiously back in 2014 after flooding in Devon, Cornwall and the Somerset Levels. Now Labour is having to grapple once more with this issue, with a number of constituencies affected by Sunday’s floods being held by the party’s leading lights. Stella Creasy has been vocal in Walthamstow while Sam Tarry cited the floods as his reason to (belatedly) drop out of the online launch of the controversial Redbridge Palestinian Solidarity Campaign last night.  Sir Keir Starmer has meanwhile

Like Covid data, polling data has a built-in time lag of several days. Those sifting the evidence on coronavirus typically expect to see about a four-day lag between someone becoming infected and them showing up as a positive case after getting tested. Indeed, the Financial Times has just produced a graph showing distinct Covid case spikes among young men four days after every England football match in the recent European championships. Opinion pollsters would recognise a similar lag when it comes to events that influence the standing of parties. It takes time for those events to percolate through the public consciousness. So the latest rash of opinion polls, which are

PMQs is sixty years old. Speaker Hoyle opened the proceedings with a reminder that the weekly cross-examinations began in July 1961. Boris wasn’t there. Well, he was, but via Zoom. A televised shot of his head was beamed from Chequers to a flat-screen screwed to a high gallery. This was unfortunate for Sir Keir Starmer who needed to tackle the blond amplitude of Boris in person. Instead, he had to wrestle with an image, to punch at a vacancy and to skewer a shimmering square of coloured pixellations. It was like headbutting a cushion. Sir Keir was armed with some excellent complaints about the government’s ping debacle. Millions of citizens

Half a century ago, Willie Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of ‘going around the country stirring up apathy’. I can think of no finer description to apply to Keir Starmer’s summer tour of Britain, during which we are told he intends to listen to the concerns of voters in a bid to win back their trust. His first such excursion, on which he was accompanied by BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, saw him encounter a dozen former Labour voters in Blackpool. Several of them confided that they had never heard of him, a revelation he described as ‘utterly frustrating’. Ms Kuenssberg reported that the gathering gave Starmer quite a rough ride

Boris Johnson’s uncomfortable session at Prime Minister’s Questions was largely of his own making rather than the work of Keir Starmer. As I wrote earlier, the Tories have tied themselves in knots over the question of taking the knee to the extent that they are now open to accusations that they don’t really care about racism. The Labour leader did a reasonable job of prosecuting the various statements made by Johnson and others, including Priti Patel’s comment that it was ‘gesture politics’.  Prime Ministers don’t tend to make a habit of carrying out of date by-election literature in their handbags That Johnson was nervous about the theme of the session became

You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. That was the formula of legendary New York governor Mario Cuomo and it served him pretty well over three successive terms in office. But it’s not quite right. Not these days.  What Boris Johnson appears to understand and Keir Starmer does not is that a key factor is whether you know how to campaign in pictures. We are a long way from an election campaign, but the natural Johnsonian flair for a compelling photograph is already being revealed as a massive advantage for him when compared to the dull visual output of the opposition leader. Becoming the leader most associated with the

Freedom Day on 19 July was the opening issue at PMQs. Boris welcomed the return to normality and the Labour leader offered to support a ‘balanced and reasonable’ end to lockdown. But he accused the government of being ‘reckless’. Hang on, cried Boris, Sir Keir was all in favour of Freedom Day last Monday. Can’t he make up his mind? Sir Keir tried to re-baptise the ‘Delta strain’ the ‘Johnson variant.’ Which is unwise politics. After trying the new label once he dropped it. Perhaps a pushy intern had suggested it. Neither leader scored a victory today. Ian Blackford of the SNP complained that the new voter-ID reforms will lead

In January 1990 things looked truly bleak for Alex Ferguson as Manchester United manager. He had not won a trophy in his first two seasons in charge and the third was going badly wrong. With a long injury list and an eight-game streak without a win, fan discontent was reaching fever pitch and media speculation suggested Ferguson was soon for the chop when his team took the field in an FA Cup third round match against Nottingham Forest. Get knocked out of that and all hope of silverware would be gone for yet another year. Fortunately for him, a young lad called Mark Robins popped up to score the crucial

Sir Keir Starmer got through the whole of PMQs without telling us that his mum was a nurse and he used to run the Crown Prosecution Service. What a relief. Instead, he gave us a different look-at-me moment. Hailing England’s victory over Germany last night he confided that his pleasure was of a purer and more refined variety than anyone else’s, ‘having been at Wembley for Euro 96 and experienced the agony of that defeat.’ The Labour leader is running out of disasters to berate the government with. The economy is on the mend. Freedom from lockdown looms. He can’t mention the Batley and Spen by-election in case he loses.