Keir starmer

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

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

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

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

Of all the people who should carry the can for Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour party, Andy Burnham doesn’t get his fair share of the stick. It was, after all, Burnham’s fear of being the most left-wing candidate in the 2015 leadership contest that led to Corbyn being ‘loaned’ enough MPs’ votes to get Dear Jeremy on the ballot. Despite this fact, Burnham felt no shame in saying in an interview this weekend that, ‘I still think life would have been different if I had won in 2015’, as if he hadn’t been his own worst enemy in denying that victory from taking place. That’s before we move onto

Keir Starmer has turned a drama into a crisis. The local elections were always going to be difficult for Labour. The government is enjoying the political dividend of the vaccine rollout, and approval for its handling of the Covid crisis is now back to where it was a month into the first national lockdown. Much of the world is still struggling, but Britain has the lowest Covid levels in Europe and Boris Johnson’s approval rating is far higher as a result. He triumphed, and Labour struggled. But Starmer made this so much worse by his actions before and after polling day. The first error was to hold the Hartlepool by-election

The resignation of Carolyn Harris as Sir Keir Starmer’s parliamentary private secretary (more here from Steerpike) shows that the peace between Angela Rayner and the Labour leader is very much on Rayner’s terms. Harris is reported to have left the job after being accused of spreading baseless rumours about the deputy leader’s private life. There have been furious briefings from both sides over the past few days but Rayner has not had to sack anyone from her side, showing she has ended up with more power than Starmer. A number of her frontbench colleagues are also seriously impressed by the way in which she negotiated her new lengthy job title over

Here are the big things I learned from Thursday’s elections and their aftermath. 1. The Scottish parliament will vote to hold a referendum on independence for Scotland — but the legislation probably won’t be introduced till late 2022. 2. The earliest there would be a referendum would be 2023. 3. Boris Johnson’s revealed preference is to persuade the people of Scotland of the merits of remaining within the UK, rather than exploiting the Westminster government’s ‘reserve power’ to veto independence. He wants to avoid what would be widely seen in Scotland as the tyranny of Westminster depriving the Scottish people of a voice on their future. That means a referendum in

After the news of a Tory landslide in Hartlepool was announced early Friday morning, senior Welsh Labour figures were worried. The scale of defeat in the North of England was worse than expected, and represented nothing short of a disaster for Keir Starmer’s leadership. Could the same fate be expected for Labour’s Red Wall in North and South Wales, which started to crack in the 2019 general election? The answer, in short, is no. Welsh Labour stormed to a breathtaking victory in the Senedd election, gaining a seat from its 2016 hall to win thirty of the sixty places in Cardiff Bay. There was a Tory whimper but no bang:

Sir Keir Starmer has just accepted that Labour needs to ‘change’ and ‘reconnect’ with voters, following the Hartlepool by-election result. In a rather stressed and evasive TV interview, the Labour leader repeatedly said his party needed to change, but refused to say whether there would be a reshuffle, or indeed what the party’s message would be. He insisted that this went ‘beyond’ a reshuffle or other questions of personnel. The reason that Starmer was asked so often about whether there would be a reshuffle is that many in his party are pressing for a number of big changes. The three people in the firing line are shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds,