Keir starmer

Boris wriggled off the hook again at PMQs

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

Katy Balls

Starmer’s PMQs attack line could spell trouble for Boris

Prime Minister’s Questions proved a rather testy affair today as both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer barked questions at each other across the Commons floor. After the Prime Minister unveiled his plans on Monday for a big bang reopening in which legal rules will be replaced by a focus on personal responsibility, Starmer urged caution.  The Labour leader quizzed Johnson on the health impact of this decision. He asked what the government estimate was for the number of hospitalisations if cases hit 50,000 a day. Johnson declined to say.  Labour’s own position on Covid rules isn’t particularly different to the Tories Starmer then moved on to the practicalities of Johnson’s planned

How Keir Starmer can rescue his leadership

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

Nick Tyrone

The Tories overplayed their hand in Batley and Spen

Over the course of the past two months, we’ve had three by-elections in England. One of them was a huge Tory gain in a previously safe Labour seat. Another was a Lib Dem by-election victory over the Conservatives in the London commuter belt. Then, yesterday, Labour held Batley and Spen, a seat that has been theirs since 1997. On paper, this wasn’t a bad run of results for Boris Johnson, as head of a party that has been in government for 11 years. Except, no one is going to be talking about it in those terms after Number 10 allowed the narrative to spin away from them completely. Instead of

PMQs: Starmer can never quite skewer Boris

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.

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