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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an FT contributing editor
Well, no one promised a quiet life. Keir Starmer’s week started with the threat of a Labour coup to replace him as prime minister. It ends at the Munich Security Conference, as European leaders struggle to shore up the continent’s security against a US president tearing down the postwar international order and a Russian leader waging war against Ukraine.
Starmer’s counterparts in Berlin, Paris and beyond are baffled by his political troubles. The question they ask comes in two parts. What on earth has he done to provoke such a backlash within the Labour Party? And how is it, in a world so imperilled by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, that his internal critics are so relaxed about triggering fresh instability? Surely Labour learnt something from the change-the-leader psychodramas that felled the Conservatives?
In other European capitals, the picture is of a prime minister who looked set to make the UK an anchor of stability in a sea of political upheaval. France’s Emmanuel Macron is hanging on by his fingernails. Likewise Spain’s Pedro Sánchez. Friedrich Merz’s Berlin coalition looks anxiously over its shoulder at the advance of the Alternative for Germany. Starmer, by contrast, sits on a seemingly impregnable parliamentary majority with three-and-a-bit-years of breathing space before the election.
Beleaguered as he is at home, the prime minister has won plaudits abroad for his approach to the global tumult threatening Europe’s and Britain’s security. He has made a start on rebuilding the bridges blown up by Boris Johnson and the Tory Brexiters when Britain left the EU. All sides agree that striking a new bargain with the EU27 will be a bumpy process. But Johnson’s grandiloquent nonsense about “global Britain” has been consigned to the dustbin. Starmer understands that British and European security and prosperity are indivisible.
Talk to officials in Berlin and the message is that Anglo-German co-operation is strong. On the big judgments — Trump, Putin, China, the Middle East — Starmer and Merz are as one. Views of the British in Paris will never be quite so unvarnished but, yes, you hear diplomats say, Macron and Starmer trust each other. And the Franco-German-British troika is the foundation of European efforts, so far successful, to check Trump’s inclination to grab Greenland from Denmark or hand victory to Putin in Ukraine.
Starmer’s government has indeed stumbled at home. It was unprepared for power. It underestimated the fiscal squeeze needed to deal with the unsustainable levels of borrowing and debt left by the outgoing Conservatives. It had not thought through how to deliver a pledge to rein in unauthorised migration. Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves have made a series of unforced errors on tax and spending. Most recently, the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington in spite of his known ties to Jeffrey Epstein was a grave mistake.
His party critics would add that Starmer, a lawyer by training who came late to parliament, has failed to command the political stage. In an age where “storytelling” is deemed the sine qua non of effective political communication, he has struggled to find a narrative.
Such criticisms cannot be brushed aside. Where the prime minister’s European colleagues have cause for confusion is that, given the dire inheritance from the Conservatives, it is hard to see how Starmer’s mis-steps justify the inevitable instability that would follow the defenestration of a sitting prime minister. The more so since no would-be successor is proposing anything resembling a radical change of course.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary and favourite of the party’s centrists, wants a faster pace of “modernisation” of public services and a more coherent strategy to promote economic growth. The left-leaning Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham say they would build more public housing and adopt a softer stance towards welfare. These are shifts in tone. A new leader would face the same real-world constraints on borrowing and debt. None of the candidates is calling for a big increase in taxes to pay for more public spending.
In truth, Starmer’s problems have little to do with ideology. The rebellion among backbench MPs is being driven by opinion polls. Labour’s standing is just about as low as it has ever been and lags well behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. Labour promised change and the electorate’s present judgment is that it has failed to deliver it.
There was a time when a 10-point deficit in the polls some three years out from a general election would have been regarded as unfortunate but readily recoverable. But we live in an age of impatience — voters are unhappy, Starmer has not worked, so let’s try someone else. Never mind that a fight for the leadership would leave the party badly divided.
As for the seeming indifference to anything happening beyond the Channel, what’s depressing is that it is real rather than apparent. Brexit, Covid, Putin and Trump might have been adequate testimony to the extent that Britain’s fortunes are shaped abroad. Yet neither Streeting, Rayner, Burnham nor rebellious MPs have as much as nodded to the epochal challenges to Britain’s security. Starmer’s party has long prided itself on its internationalism. Now, it seems, Labour prefers to live in Little England.