Starmer's pointless globetrotting proves how irrelevant he is
Sir Keir Starmer clearly finds burnishing his credentials as a statesman on the world stage far more to his liking than dealing with pesky domestic concerns, such as cutting disability benefits and the winter fuel allowance.
British prime ministers usually seek solace in endless overseas jamborees once they have first served a lengthy apprenticeship in Downing Street. Tony Blair was well into his third term before taking refuge in foreign junkets as his domestic popularity waned.
By contrast, Starmer, who now has the unenviable honour of the lowest net favourability rating on record, has developed the taste for travelling abroad remarkably early in his premiership. Rather than investing effort in rallying support for policies, 'Never-Here Keir' prefers to spend his time hobnobbing with other world leaders.
Last week our Prime Minister was missing in action, attending the increasingly irrelevant meeting of G7 leaders in Canada. It was memorable solely for Donald Trump's sensible decision to head for the exit early to attend to the deepening Iran-Israel conflict.
Starmer was in The Hague attending the annual get-together of Nato leaders, where he desperately sought to persuade an increasingly sceptical Trump administration that his Government really was committed to spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035.
By that date, Starmer's undistinguished term in office will be a distant memory. And the defence of the realm will not have been improved a jot by the investment in rural broadband and national roadworks that Starmer now claims is a vital part of his plan to increase overall defence spending.
A more detailed examination of the Government's defence plans – one that our allies in the Pentagon will be studying closely – is that there will be no new money to increase the number of troops available to fight the wars of the future.
Starmer's boast at the Nato summit that the UK would meet the alliance's new spending target of 5 per cent of GDP 'to deepen our commitment to Nato' is nothing more than an elaborate Treasury 'smoke and mirrors' exercise.
Even the highly publicised decision to buy 12 F-35A stealth fighters, which can carry tactical nuclear weapons, has been taken at the expense of buying more of the F-35B variant used by the Royal Navy's two 65,000-ton aircraft carriers, thereby severely diminishing their war-fighting capabilities.
Nor does Starmer's endless globetrotting appear to have had any noticeable bearing on his ability to influence key events, as was evident during the Trump administration's decision to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
While Starmer has an unerring habit of making sure he is photographed next to Trump whenever there is a summit photo op, his ability to bring any influence to bear on the Trump administration's decision-making process is negligible.
The first Starmer knew that Trump had given the go-ahead for the bombing raid was when he received a telephone call from the US leader at Chequers, after the B-2 stealth bombers were already in the air. It was merely a courtesy call from Trump, not a consultation with a key ally.
The fact that Starmer was completely blindsided by Trump's decision to attack Iran is hardly surprising given that David Lammy, his hapless Foreign Secretary, had returned from meeting Trump administration officials earlier that week insisting there was still a 'window of opportunity' to de-escalate the conflict.
The bitter truth is that, for all Starmer attempts to ingratiate himself with world leaders, no one is taking him seriously as a statesman. And this is no wonder given his default response when faced with an international crisis is to indulge in legalistic sophistry and equivocation.
Starmer's inability to formulate a clear and coherent response when faced with a global crisis was clearly evident from his handling of the Gaza conflict, when he supported Israel's right to defend itself while at the same time backing the imposition of punitive measures against key members of the Israeli government.
The prime minister's leadership failings were again in evidence in the aftermath of the US raid on Iran's infrastructure.
While insisting that the UK remained opposed to the ayatollahs acquiring nuclear weapons, Starmer could not bring himself to issue a public declaration of support for Trump's decisive action, which has destroyed any hope the Iranians may have entertained of developing nuclear warheads in the near future.
The result is that, for all Starmer's grandstanding at global summits, no one is going to take a politician seriously who is quite content to deceive the outside world about the UK's defence commitments, while at the same time being temperamentally incapable of making his mind up on international issues.
Starmer may like to project the image of a global statesman, but the brutal truth is that few world leaders, least of all in Washington, have much interest in hearing the views – or lack of them – of Starmer and his Government.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
12 minutes ago
- Times
MPs learn Wagatha lessons from Coleen Rooney
MPs take inspiration from anyone: Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and, it seems, Coleen Rooney. A group of LGBT MPs have followed the example of the footballer's wife as they sought to eliminate colleagues from a WhatsApp group that leaked to The Mail on Sunday. The leak, which took place after the Supreme Court's trans decision, caused embarrassment to ministers Angela Eagle and Chris Bryant, but the group's admins haven't taken it lying down. They have set up a new group, methodically leaving out suspects, and now believe the culprits have been excluded. This echoes Rooney's method for finding the person who leaked stories about her to the tabloids but, unlike when she identified Rebekah Vardy, with no naming and shaming. This is a classier operation: less Wagatha Christie, more MPD James. If leaks come from the government, they may be unintentional. A PPS has been repeatedly heard loudly dictating voice notes on his phone, thereby sharing sensitive details. Journalists are among those in earshot and they know this MP's voice well. He is so ambitious that he's usually loudly asking them if they know when the reshuffle is. A worrying sign for Sir Keir Starmer ahead of a big backbench revolt. At lunch yesterday, diners in parliament discovered a shortage of knives. Rare in Westminster for the demand for backstabbing to exceed supply. One of Westminster's most quietly influential groups celebrated its half-century on Tuesday night. The Debating Group has helped to launch the careers of future PMs and chancellors, including the young Tony Blair, Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt. 'Speaking at one of these debates is a surefire route to Downing Street,' said one of those attending the birthday party in Westminster. The group even helped the careers of those who failed to speak for it. In 1998, one future PM missed the debate on 'Modern politics is more concerned with image than reality' but did come to eat the dinner afterwards. That was Boris Johnson, never missing a chance to have his cake and eat it too. The New York Democrats' election of a socialist as their candidate for mayor alarmed chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, an avowed critic of Vladimir Putin and former citizen of the USSR. After the result from his sometime home in the US, he wrote: 'Socialism is like polio. It comes back when people forget about the horrible damage it did last time.' After Donald Trump swapped real bombs for the f-bomb, it should be noted that other presidents turned the air blue (albeit in private). Nixon taped himself doing it, while LBJ was notoriously coarse, but Andrew Jackson's vulgarity was revealed in unorthodox style. A witness to his funeral in 1845 said it was interrupted by someone 'swearing so loud and long as to disturb the people'. The profane mourner 'had to be carried from the house'. The culprit was Poll, the deceased president's parrot.
BBC News
15 minutes ago
- BBC News
The Documentary Podcast Inside the US trans military ban
One of the first executive orders that President Donald Trump signed in his second term of office stated that being transgender is incompatible with the 'rigorous standards necessary for military service'. It set the stage for a ban on trans people serving in the military, regardless of ability, rank or service history. Official figures say there are 4,240 transgender service members in the US armed forces, however research commissioned by the US Defense Department in 2016 estimated there could be up to around 10,000. Over the past four months the BBC has been following the stories of two trans service people as the executive order took effect. Both have served 17 years in the military, and are now facing the threat of a dishonourable discharge. Archive sources: NBC News, FOX News, CBS News, CNN, Chicks on the Right, Newsmax, 9 News, WKYC, ABC News, US Army's School of Advanced Military Studies
Spectator
15 minutes ago
- Spectator
Is the Met finally getting tough on pro-Palestine protests?
It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go to parliament and to interview Kemi Badenoch at a Policy Exchange event across the square. Palestine Action had announced a protest march against Donald Trump's and Israel's 'genocide' for that time. Although the Met had banned it from the area, I had recently witnessed so many ill-contained and threatening protests there – almost all for Palestinian causes – that I fully expected delay, disruption and occasional harassment. This time, however, it turned out that the Met meant business. The protest was well-contained in the designated streets round Trafalgar Square. May this mark the permanent change many of us have long been calling for. The delightful absence of trouble that day brought home to me how oppressive those past protests had become. The Met's blind commitment to 'the right to protest' effectively ceded control of the streets, public spaces and Tube stations, giving the extremists a preposterous media salience. That right kept cancelling more important rights – those of MPs, peers and parliamentary staff to get on with their work and of the ordinary public to attend parliament as they please or go about their normal business. The constant threat to the security of parliament has increasingly cut it off, created ugly physical barriers and intimidated the parliamentary authorities. By besieging parliament, you subtly delegitimate it. The Met Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, justified his new toughness by saying that Palestine Action is 'an organised extremist criminal group', as witness the expensive damage it claims to have done to RAF planes at Brize Norton. It is, but he could have said much the same 18 months ago of the endless semi-violent anti-Semitic elements which so often march against Israel without a word to say against Hamas's 7 October massacres or Iran's bomb. Theirs have not been what Sir Mark calls 'protests of a different character' from those of Palestine Action. They have been cut from the same keffiyeh. He says the charges against Palestine Action 'represent a form of extremism that I believe the overwhelming majority of the public reject'. What forms of extremism do the overwhelming majority not reject? Anyway, there is joy over the sinner that repenteth. If Palestine Action is to be proscribed, this is the time to pursue its other boasted achievements. In March last year, in my Cambridge college, Trinity, it claimed responsibility for the slashing and spray-painting of de Laszlo's portrait of Arthur Balfour, prime minister, chancellor of Cambridge University and author of the Balfour Declaration. The incident was filmed and posted by the perpetrators, but a year later the police said that 'the investigation has now been filed'. It is hard to believe that these outrages are untraceable, once you identify their Islamist/far-left political motivation and therefore know where to look. By chance, it is 50 years ago this autumn that I matriculated at Trinity. There is a half-century dinner there next month for all of us, but not for me, due to a clerical error in the college's email records. This error has now been corrected with a vengeance and I have since received eight invitations to the Trinity Giving Days in which alumni contribute to bursaries. What is more exciting, however, is that the period in question has also been marked in verse. Four years ago, I drew attention (see Notes, 10 July 2021) to The Examined Life, James Harpur's book of poetry about his time at Cranleigh, his public school in Surrey, which in its 160-year existence has achieved respectability rather than celebrity and is therefore a tricky subject for the muse. The book was a brilliant success, doing what good poetry does uniquely well – suggesting the general from the minutely observed particular. Now Harpur has done this again with Trinity, where he was a year below me, in a new volume called The Magic Theatre. Cambridge has been the subject of rather more poems than Cranleigh, so the bar is higher. But I think Harpur clears it. In my first year at Trinity, I was thrilled to hear that the set I was sharing with Oliver Letwin – G3 New Court – was the same to which Tennyson returns in 'In Memoriam'. It had been occupied by his beloved Arthur Hallam, whom the poem mourns: Up that long walk of limes I past To see the rooms in which he dwelt. Another name was on the door: I linger'd; all within was noise Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys That crash'd the glass and beat the floor; Where once we held debate, a band Of youthful friends, on mind and art, And labour, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land; When one would aim an arrow fair, But send it slackly from the string; And one would pierce an outer ring, And one an inner, here and there; And last the master-bowman, he, Would cleave the mark.' That could have been an exact description of Oliver's debating prowess, displayed in those very rooms. The trouble with 'In Memoriam', however, is that such exactness is mostly absent. It is a great poem, but more about grief and 'the unquiet heart' ('in words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er') than one rooted in the specific. In this sense, I get more out of Harpur's Cambridge than Tennyson's. Whether he writes about revising or punting or amateur acting ('the tinnitus of humiliation') or lost love, he places his young self in those strange three years granted to you in that (then) small town where your life is more imagined than real, and the better for it. On one tiny point I must correct James Harpur. In a poem which turns out to be about me, I have 'a sleeve of navy velvet'. No; it was only corduroy. We were poor students, after all.
