Keir starmer

What does the Labour party stand for? That’s the big question that Keir Starmer needs to answer this week, and so far it’s proving rather more difficult to answer than you might imagine. Its frontbenchers are mostly working on policies that won’t be announced this week, so they are resorting to talking about the party’s heritage and listing the increasing number of elections the party has lost. A line that I’ve heard from a number of shadow ministers on the fringe over the past few days is ‘we need to learn from the losses of 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019’. I’ve heard rather fewer assertions about winning the next election,

Keir Starmer this evening managed to scrape through his reforms to how Labour elects its leader. The victory follows a very passionate debate at the party’s conference over the policy, which will raise the qualifying threshold of support from MPs in leadership elections from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. It also drops registered supporters, who could join by paying just £3, from being able to vote in leadership elections and introduces a cut-off date for membership when a contest begins. The idea is that when there is a new leadership contest after Starmer, Labour won’t end up electing a fringe candidate. In other words, it is designed to stop

Keir Starmer is a keen amateur footballer. It’s one of the few facts anyone knows about the Labour leader. He enjoys a game on his spare time, and on the campaign trail too. One person who played with him recently told me: ‘You can tell he plays a lot and takes it very seriously.’ What they couldn’t say was that he was very good at it. Starmer is currently trying to play a political game by changing the rules for Labour’s leadership elections. It’s a big and serious move as it would make it harder for the party to go left when it picks his successor. It is therefore a

Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a particular phone number, the newspaper would pay you a fiver. Gleefully, some weeks later, they reported that nobody had telephoned to collect their prize – from which they deduced that despite its sales figures, practically nobody was actually reading the book to the end. About halfway through reading Keir Starmer’s new pamphlet for the Fabian

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