Keir starmer

What does Starmer actually stand for?

The biggest reason Keir Starmer has proved a flop is not that he leads an unelectable rabble, or that Labour’s coalition of voters is splintering, or even that Covid has marginalised him — it is far simpler: He’s never known what to do. In fact, he lacks the first clue about how to do politics. High-powered lawyer he may once have been, but we might as well have pulled some random middle-class bloke out of a saloon car on a ring road and invited him to captain Britain’s next doomed attempt to win the America’s Cup yachting challenge. Because Starmer’s default pose is to be frozen at the wheel and

Why Labour should stick with Starmer – even if he loses Batley

Things could be bleak for Labour in the Batley and Spen by-election this Thursday. Throughout an ugly and dispiriting campaign all round, George Galloway’s entrance into the race has threatened to prevent a Labour victory. If the party loses, Starmer’s position will be on even shakier ground. He might even be deposed. But if that were to happen, it would be a mistake for Labour, one felt for years to come. Keir Starmer has made a lot of errors since becoming leader of the Labour party. He seemed to assume that just being presentable and not Jeremy Corbyn would be enough to see his party rise in the polls again.

Keir Starmer’s days are numbered

I think Keir’s had it. This may not discomfort you terribly, I know. Still less the fact that Labour will rummage around in its idiot box and find someone even more un-electable to lead the party. Cheeky Nandos perhaps, or Angela No-Brayner. Someone mental for whom patriotism is an anathema and who finds it difficult to rise up for a moment off their knee, all the while banging together saucepans for the NHS, Cuba and transgender rights. Starmer’s days are numbered because of what just happened in Chesham and Amersham and what is about to happen in Batley and Spen. Sacking his closest ally and election edgelord supremo, Baroness Chapman

PMQs: Boris feels more threatened by Sir Ed than Sir Keir

At PMQs Sir Keir Starmer led on the tricky subject of rape. He cornered the PM with a precisely worded four-part question about the fact that 98 per cent of reported rapes don’t lead to criminal charges. The PM countered that Labour had recently voted against a bill that toughened up sentences for violent sexual offenders. Sir Keir had war-gamed this in advance. And how he pounced. ‘What provision, what clause, what chapter or what words of that bill will do anything to change the fact that 98.4 per cent of reported rapes don’t end up in a charge?’ Without hesitation, Boris said, ‘Section 106 and 107 of that bill

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Johnson’s inappropriate jab joke

Sir Keir Starmer had a powerful line of attack at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. He led on the government’s own review of the treatment of rape and sexual violence, which recommended sweeping reforms to the way cases are handled so that the current low rate of charges and convictions can be reversed. Prosecutions have fallen by nearly 60 per cent in four years — to just 2,102 — while convictions have also experienced a similar decline. Today, Starmer pointed out that 98.4 per cent of reported rapes don’t lead to a charge. He repeatedly pressed Johnson on what the government was actually doing beyond apologising for the current situation. It undid

Patrick O'Flynn

Labour’s killer queen is the perfect replacement for Starmer

As Keir Starmer’s re-run of the great Change UK centrist dad experiment sinks deeper into political quicksand, the importance of a party leader being able to project a compelling personality becomes ever more obvious. Even the pinko pundit class that was overjoyed by his election as Labour leader is now close to giving up on Starmer, whose lack of ringcraft reminds us that there is something to be said for career politicians after all. Ambitious shadow ministers with antennae more finely tuned in to the public mood than his are said already to be preparing prospective leadership campaign teams in anticipation of the voters of Batley and Spen delivering a

Labour’s worrying descent into communalism

Labour’s candidate in Batley and Spen, Kim Leadbeater, reportedly pulled out of a hustings featuring George Galloway over the weekend. This makes sense. Not only is Galloway a master of bluster whose pompous bombast has a steamroller quality in a debate, but Leadbeater would have been debating the person of whom she is currently doing a dubious impression. If the organisers were concerned about getting Labour’s perspective, they could have stuck a mirror in front of Galloway and given it equal time. The no-show came as Leadbeater, whose sister Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing extremist five years ago, told the Independent: I think sadly there are a number

Nick Tyrone

Why the Unite election matters

Next Thursday, the voters of Batley and Spen will go to their polling stations ostensibly to pick their next MP — but at the same time, could decide the ultimate fate of Keir Starmer. If Labour lose the by-election, his leadership will face a whole new level of trouble. Yet despite the importance of this contest, there is another one that is about to properly kick-off that is even more key to Labour’s future — the race to become the next general secretary of Unite. The current general secretary of the largest trade union in Great Britain, Len McCluskey, is rightfully infamous. During his reign, he has tried to pull Labour

PMQs: Ian Blackford’s trade rage

Covid changes its identity more often than Grant Shapps. The latest strain emerged with the appealingly exotic name ‘Indian’. Now it’s been given a more military-sounding tag, ‘the Delta variant.’ Today’s PMQs featured a tussle over the date on which this dangerous mutant sneaked through the UK’s borders. Sir Keir Starmer waved a file of papers at Boris. ‘It’s all here in the transcript,’ he said and he accused the PM of waiting too long to slap a ‘red list’ notice on India.  For once, Sir Keir had his timelines in a twist. Boris flourished a counter-file at the opposition leader. It was written, said the PM, by the general

Isabel Hardman

Keir Starmer fails to use the ‘Dom bombs’ at PMQs

Keir Starmer was back on his home turf at Prime Minister’s Questions today, attacking Boris Johnson for what he said was a lack of competence in containing the spread of the Delta variant. The Labour leader focused on the delay in putting India on the red list, turning one of the Prime Minister’s stock phrases against him, saying: ‘While the NHS was vaccinating, he was vacillating.’ Starmer said that if Johnson had acted quickly enough to put India on the list, ‘we wouldn’t have had the Delta variant here’, later adding: ‘The British people don’t expect miracles but they do expect basic competence and honesty.’ He asked why anyone should

How Starmer can beat Boris

How should Keir Starmer deal with a problem like Boris Johnson? Despite the Prime Minister’s mistakes in the handling of the pandemic – and a string of embarrassing stories about his private life and finances – Boris seems unassailable. Johnson is seen as best suited to be Prime Minister by 40 per cent of voters compared to just 23 per cent for Starmer; most surveys give the Tories a double digit lead over Labour. Party leaders receive much unsolicited and often useless advice. Starmer is not alone in that. Over the years, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has been scoured for helpful aphorisms, while Machiavelli’s The Prince is still

The progressive imperialism of Keir Starmer’s Palestine policy

There are two ways to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s call for the Prime Minister ‘to press for a renewed international agreement to finally recognise the State of Palestine’ at the G7 summit. The first is cynical: that the intended audience was not the government benches or the international community, but the voters of Batley and Spen, currently weighing up whether to elect another Labour MP in next month’s by-election. At the 2011 census, almost one in five residents were Muslim and knowing what we know about how progressives view religious and ethnic minorities, it is not a stretch to assume Sir Keir was merely electioneering. This mindset, which sees

Labour is in last chance saloon

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end

The Keir Starmer revelation that we didn’t air

Following my abrupt departure from Good Morning Britain after declining to apologise for disbelieving Meghan ‘Princess Pinocchio’ Markle, I’ve been riding a rare wave of public popularity, with my anti-woke, pro-free speech book Wake Up becoming a no. 1 bestseller and people stopping me in the street to offer support. A lady named Marion from Eastbourne wrote to compare my campaign to that of John Lilburne, the 17th-century English political leveller who coined the term ‘freeborn rights’ and became a champion of liberty. She wrote: ‘Lilburne spent his life fighting for freedom of speech, and for this he was whipped, pilloried, half-starved, exiled, imprisoned and twice put on trial for

Ikea Starmer: Labour’s wooden leader

This was perhaps the most heavily-trailed Kleenex moment in recent TV history. The advance clips of Sir Keir Starmer’s interview with Piers Morgan suggested that the Labour leader would well up on-screen as he recalled his parents’ deaths and the fate of a family pet that was killed in a shed fire. We’re accustomed to seeing our leaders in tears. Mrs Thatcher wept after delivering her farewell address outside No. 10 in November 1990. She held it together for the speech itself but cracked up when she walked away from the microphone and towards her official car. Photos of her inside the vehicle showed her biting her jaw while her

James Forsyth

Keir Starmer’s interview gamble pays off

One of the biggest challenges for any leader of the opposition is getting noticed. Doing that requires taking some risks and Keir Starmer’s sit down with Piers Morgan was a bit of a risk – politicians can get caught out in these more personal formats. Starmer did well, though. He didn’t fall into any Nick Clegg style traps; navigating the sex and drugs questions with relative ease. He talked movingly about his mother, and how she coped with her long illness. His relationship with his own father clearly wasn’t easy, Starmer said the only time his father ever said he was proud of him was when he passed the 11-plus,

Watch: Keir Starmer refuses to deny taking drugs at university

Keir Starmer’s appearance on Piers Morgan’s ‘Life Stories’ is a sign of desperation. The Labour leader knows he must do something about the dire situation his party is in, following the disastrous defeat at the Hartlepool by-election. One of the big criticisms levelled at Starmer is that he lacks charisma. His decision to agree to be interviewed by Morgan is an attempt to do something about that, by showing people the ‘real’ Starmer. Unfortunately, though, it seems there are some things that remain off limits, not least what Starmer the student got up to during his time at Leeds university.  Morgan quizzed Starmer at least ten times on whether the

‘There is no alternative’: Why Boris will keep winning

Those of us who generally wish this Government well and consider Boris Johnson a preferable holder of the office of prime minister to any likely alternative are facing a new accusation this weekend. The vast brigade of pinko pundits who have predicted Johnson’s downfall on numerous occasions only to be proved wrong each time, have changed tack. They now mostly acknowledge that rows over prorogations or pelmets – or even this week’s Dominic Cummings spectacular – are likely to have only a very limited impact upon public opinion. But they shake their heads sadly at us and tell us this is not the point. Rather, what actually matters is that

Sir Keir was defeated by his own strategy at PMQs

The great thing about being trashed in the polls is that the tiniest improvement looks like a triumphant comeback. At PMQs the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, needed to do some minor damage to Boris’s armour. The teeniest dent could be spun as a glorious revival. But Sir Keir was defeated by his own strategy. He attacked the government’s red-amber-green system of travel restrictions. This metaphorical tricolour is easy to interpret: amber-list countries are safe to travel to except when they’re dangerous. And amber-list countries are dangerous to travel to except when they’re safe. It’s the legal equivalent of an ‘amber shopping day,’ when thieves can operate with impunity. Sir

Isabel Hardman

Starmer’s flip-flopping came back to haunt him at PMQs

Prime Minister’s Questions today wasn’t a particularly easy session for either man taking the main exchanges. For Boris Johnson, it was a struggle to answer what Sir Keir Starmer referred to as a ‘simple question that goes to the heart of this issue’: if it’s not advisable for people to travel to amber list countries unless absolutely necessary, is it now easier for them to do so?  Johnson repeatedly stressed that the government has been clear on travel restrictions, quarantine measures and penalties for failing to observe these rules. But a simple rule in politics is that if you’re having to insist you’ve been clear, then your messages are as