Keir starmer

Thursday

Tim Shipman

‘Let Keir be Keir’: inside the cabinet’s away day

Labour ministers face a range of terrible political choices, but when the cabinet met for an away day at Chequers last Friday, the first dilemma was what to wear. ‘There was panic beforehand about what “smart-casual” meant,’ one ministerial aide says. Both Hilary Benn and John Healey turned up in dark suits and red ties. ‘To be fair to the Defence Secretary, he hadn’t seen that bit of the invite,’ a No. 10 official explains. ‘Whereas in Hilary’s case, that is what his smart-casual looks like.’ By contrast, Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, turned up in what one observer describes as a ‘tech bro AI T-shirt’. Finding an economic policy

Thursday

Laurie Penny

Corbyn’s new party is Starmer’s creation

Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point in the same direction. Starmer’s team have been so busy admiring their enormous majority that it has taken them a while to realise that they are trapped with 400 left-wingers in every shade of red from post-Soviet carmine to the most delicate salmon pink, all of them high on victory and spoiling for a fight.

Tim Shipman

The reign of Rayner

Angela Rayner declined an invitation to a hen do last weekend where the entertainment included axe-throwing. ‘She was worried about photos,’ says one attendee. The Deputy Prime Minister had to see a family member instead, but a close ally admits: ‘She is more careful about attracting that sort of publicity than she used to be.’ Robbed as we are of the sight of Rayner waving an axe around when the Prime Minister is suffering his worst weeks in Downing Street, it is tempting to ask, as Metternich didn’t quite say of Talleyrand: ‘What did she mean by that?’ It’s a far cry from the days when she screamed that the

Saturday

Tim Shipman

Labour’s first year (in review) with Tim Shipman & Quentin Letts

22 min listen

Cast your mind back a year. Labour had just won a storming majority, promising ‘change’ to a stale Tory party that was struggling to govern. But have things got any better? In the magazine this week, Tim Shipman writes the cover piece to mark the occasion of Labour’s first year in government. He takes readers through three chapters: from Sue Gray (freebies scandal and winter fuel cut) to Morgan McSweeney (a degree of professionalisation and dealing with the Donald) to the point at which ‘things fall apart’ (assisted dying, the welfare vote and Reeves’s tears). On the podcast, Tim is joined by The Spectator’s James Heale as well as sketchwriter

Thursday

William Moore

Claws out for Keir, Mamdani’s poisoned apple & are most wedding toasts awful?

46 min listen

This week: one year of Labour – the verdict In the magazine this week Tim Shipman declares his verdict on Keir Starmer’s Labour government as we approach the first anniversary of their election victory. One year on, some of Labour’s most notable policies have been completely changed – from the u-turn over winter fuel allowance to the embarrassing climb-down over welfare this week. Starmer has appeared more confident on the world stage but, for domestic audiences, this is small consolation when the public has perceived little change on the problems that have faced Britain for years. Can Starmer turn it around? Tim joined the podcast alongside the Spectator’s editor Michael

Matthew Parris

How Labour governments always end

Couldn’t we just skip to the end? I’m old enough to have seen this so often: must I sit through each dreary succeeding scene again? Parties in government are animals: they have natures; their natures do not change; they are incapable of being different animals; and what follows, follows. A Labour government finally runs out of money and enters a period of slow-motion disintegration, ending in a chaos of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, still whimpering about social justice as the bailiffs move in. Already the suspense has gone. There will be many twists and turns, probably over years rather than months, before this government pulls apart at the seams; but, honestly,

Dot Wordsworth

The politics of pips

‘What larks!’ exclaimed my husband archly, assuming that a connection between personal independence payments and Pip in Great Expectations would be amusing. But it is true that the political wrangle over personal independence payments would have been harder to popularise without the cheery abbreviation. Some of us remember Denis Healey’s promise to ‘squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak’. He might also have made similar promises about the rich in general. His inspiration was Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1917. ‘We will get everything out of her that you can squeeze out of a lemon,’ he said of Germany in December 1918. ‘I will squeeze

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Welfare rebellions, Glastonbury chants and Lucy Letby arrests

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, in the face of a rebellion by 120 backbenchers over the welfare bill, undertook to limit to new claimants restrictions on personal independence payments (Pip). Modelling by the Department for Work and Pensions predicted that 150,000 people might be pushed into ‘relative poverty’ by the revised welfare cuts, compared with 250,000 before. Still fearing defeat, the government made more last-minute concessions, postponing changes to Pip rules until after a review by Sir Stephen Timms, the disability minister. The government then won the second reading by 335 to 260, with 49 Labour MPs voting against. It was not clear that the eviscerated bill would

Monday

Tim Shipman

Does Starmer still want to be PM?

13 min listen

There have been a number of navel-gazing interviews with the Prime Minister over the weekend. Across thousands and thousands of words, he seems to be saying – if you read between the lines – that he doesn’t particularly enjoy being PM. In better news, Labour seems to have quelled the welfare rebellion. Liz Kendall is making a statement in the Commons this afternoon, in which she will outline the concessions that Labour has made on its controversial welfare bill. All in, the cost has spiralled by £3 billion per calendar year – which an already put-upon Chancellor will have to find. Whilst it remains the largest rebellion of this government,

Friday

Oscar Edmondson

Welfare U-turn: is Keir in control?

15 min listen

Keir Starmer has performed a screeching about-turn on his flagship welfare reforms, all in the hope of quelling the rebellion from more than 120 MPs who have been promised ‘massive concessions’ over concerns about disability benefits. These include moderating the bill to make it easier for people with multiple impairments to claim disability benefits, and offering to protect Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for all existing claimants for ever – to ensure there would be no detriment from the reforms for existing claimants, a key concern of the welfare rebels. But new claimants will be affected, as ministers desperately try to stop ever-spiralling disability and sickness welfare spending climbing to £100

Thursday

Michael Gove

Who’s having a worse week: Keir or Kemi?

20 min listen

It’s bad news all round for Labour and the Tories. An MRP poll out today forecasts that if an election were held tomorrow, Labour would not only lose its majority, but fall behind Reform to become the second-largest party. The Conservatives would be reduced to a mere 46 seats, placing them fourth behind the Lib Dems. But that’s just the beginning of their collective woes. On the Labour side – despite Keir Starmer’s charm offensive and ongoing talks with Labour MPs about potential changes to welfare policy – the number of rebels appears to be growing. The feeling increasingly is that someone might have to go, and calls for ‘regime

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Starmer at sea, Iran on the brink & the importance of shame

46 min listen

Starmer’s war zone: the Prime Minister’s perilous position This week, our new political editor Tim Shipman takes the helm and, in his cover piece, examines how Keir Starmer can no longer find political refuge in foreign affairs. After a period of globe-trotting in which the Prime Minister was dubbed ‘never-here Keir’, Starmer’s handling of international matters had largely been seen as a strength. But as tensions escalate in the Iran–Israel conflict, global events are beginning to create serious challenges. They threaten not only to derail the government’s economic plans but also to deepen divisions within the Labour party, particularly between the leadership and much of the parliamentary party. Tim joined

Dot Wordsworth

The politics of ‘rocket boosters’

Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised to ‘put rocket boosters’ under construction in areas that were already built up. Usually rocket boosters are put under things, but Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, was more anatomical in his thoughts, praising a youth mobility scheme that would ‘put rocket boosters up businesses in London’. Even so, in

Tim Shipman

Starmer’s war zone: the Prime Minister is in a perilous position

Sir Keir Starmer was alerted in the early hours of Friday by his national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, that Israel’s assault on Iran was ‘under way’. The Prime Minister got a text message while in his flat above No. 11. It was not a bolt from the blue. Downing Street has not said so publicly, but the government was told in advance what was coming. Publicly, Starmer’s relentless emphasis has been on ‘de-escalation’ of the crisis. Privately, ministers have been expecting an Israeli offensive since December. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, led a cross-Whitehall tabletop war-gaming exercise into how events might unfold on Monday last week, four days before the

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Liverpool parade crash, Starmer sacrifices Chagos Islands and an octopus invasion

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced that ‘more pensioners’ would qualify for winter fuel payments, but did not say how many or when. Nigel Farage of Reform said he would scrap net zero to fund things like abolishing the two-child benefit cap and reversing the winter fuel cut in full. Millions of public-sector workers such as doctors and teachers were offered rises of between 3.6 and 4.5 per cent. From July, typical household energy costs will fall by £129 a year, still higher than a year earlier. South Western Railway was renationalised. Thames Water was fined £122.7 million by Ofwat for breaching rules on sewage and shareholder dividends.

Saturday

Natasha Feroze

Michael Gove on Starmer vs the workers: why Labour needs to learn to love Brexit

20 min listen

Spectator editor Michael Gove joins Natasha Feroze to talk about his cover article this week: ‘Starmer vs the workers’, the real Brexit betrayal. Michael puts forward his arguments for why Labour should learn to love Brexit, should take back control to protect British jobs and industries, and could use Brexit as an opportunity to harness AI and science & technology. Plus, has the UK-EU deal brought back ‘happy memories’ for the former prominent Brexiteer? Produced by Natasha Feroze and Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Michael Gove

Starmer vs the workers: the real Brexit betrayal

Keir Starmer looked blank. The shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, seemed confused. Only the old Stalinist Seumas Milne seemed really to understand. It was 2019. Labour’s front bench team, and their leader Jeremy Corbyn’s close advisers, were being upbraided – from the left. Why were they putting the interests of international capital ahead of our workers? Why were they abandoning the chance to implement a meaningful industrial policy? Why were they giving up on the chance to save British steel, to give all support necessary to our manufacturing sector, to make a stand against neo-liberalism? The person in the room making the challenge, over ginger beer and sandwiches, was not Owen

Richard Johnson

Labour must learn to love Brexit

The problem with Keir Starmer’s approach to Brexit is that it fundamentally misunderstands the country. It isn’t that the Leave-voting public have realised that they made the wrong choice, foolishly tricked by the slogan on the side of a bus a decade ago. Voters in Grimsby have not suddenly been won round to the virtues of the Common Fisheries Policy. Most Leavers do not suddenly think shorter queues at the airport in Sofia is worth the downward pressure on wages caused by thousands of young Bulgarians who (understandably) will think Britain’s £12.21 minimum wage is more attractive than Bulgaria’s roughly £3 per hour. The reason people feel dissatisfied with Brexit

James Heale

What do 'Labour values' actually mean?

Keir Starmer’s appearance before Labour MPs on Monday was a crowded affair. Such was the level of excitement that organisers set up an overspill room in parliament. A fortnight after a dire set of local election results, the Prime Minister promised to fight the next election ‘as Labour’. Yet his troops seem increasingly divided as to what that actually means. More than two dozen MPs spoke at that meeting, criticising Starmer’s Gaza policy, migration speech and welfare cuts. It is those benefit changes that are causing the most immediate grief to the whips. Ministers want to restrict the eligibility requirements for disability payments, meaning only those with the most serious

Rod Liddle

Reform and the problem with the Overton window

In the space of about one month a further 9 per cent of the electorate has decided that the views of Reform UK accord with their own take on the world, putting Nigel Farage’s party well ahead of the government in the polls and leaving the Conservatives trailing Ed Davey’s cavalcade of grinning village idiots. The Greens are not that far behind the Tories, either, on 10 per cent. This means that policies which were once considered extreme, such as the immediate joyous jettisoning of all that diversity, equality and inclusion rubbish and drastic action taken against asylum seekers, are now considered acceptable by almost a third of the electorate.