Keir Starmer has been a disaster as British Prime Minister. Don’t just take my word for it. In the week of the first anniversary of Starmer moving into No 10, the polling guru Sir John Curtice said that he has had ‘the worst start for any newly-elected Prime Minister, Labour or Conservative’.
By this he means the Starmer government has suffered the biggest fall in public support for a new administration in history.
Such is the calamitous collapse in his popularity that he has felt obliged to apologise for his mistakes in a series of interviews to mark his first year in Downing Street. Starmer argued, for instance, that a necessary focus on international affairs had been behind his failure to appreciate the strength of feeling over welfare reforms – reforms on which he has now U-turned.
Yet, as Curtice remarked: ‘Apologies rarely help. U-turns can suggest a lack of direction which is already one of this country’s biggest problems.’
The truth is that Starmer’s first year in office has been marked by vacillation, hesitancy, cowardice and a betrayal of the British people.
He is the antithesis of Margaret Thatcher and, in my view, the weakest prime minister since Neville Chamberlain.
My former boss Lady Thatcher would have viewed Starmer as an incredibly dangerous figure, who cares nothing for the British national interest.
Lady Thatcher, for whom I worked in her private office, lived every moment of her public life for the sake of the British people. She was deeply patriotic, with a great sense of duty to her nation, its history and its role in the world.
Starmer’s first year in office has been marked by vacillation, hesitancy, cowardice and a betrayal of the British people, writes Nile Gardiner
When the Iron Lady represented Britain at an international summit – from the Commonwealth to the G7 – she stood tall as a Titan with tremendous stature and resolve. She was a giant on the global stage.
In contrast, for all his claims of ‘focusing on international affairs’, Starmer is invisible as a world leader – a foreign policy vacuum. This was clear at the NATO Summit last week.
I was there in The Hague taking part in the NATO Public Forum, watching developments unfold in the Dutch city during a historic gathering of allied prime ministers and presidents pledging a dramatic increase in defence spending.
The summit was dominated by Donald Trump, who bestrode the stage while the likes of Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz were relegated to supporting roles.
In practically every respect, Starmer is the polar opposite of Trump who, whether you like him or not, leads the United States and the free world with the kind of conviction displayed in his strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme.
It’s hard to imagine Starmer doing anything decisive at all in terms of projecting British power abroad, let alone halting an Islamist dictatorship hellbent on building nuclear weapons. Starmer would rather lecture Israel and America on international law than take action against Iran’s malevolent nuclear ambitions.
Polling guru Sir John Curtice said that Sir Keir has had ‘the worst start for any newly-elected Prime Minister, Labour or Conservative’
Trump’s decisive action showed up what a truly gutless politician Starmer is, one who looks increasingly like a deer in the headlights rather than a roaring British lion.
He could not even bring himself to pledge British military support for the United States if the Americans came under attack from Iran. Who needs so-called friends like this at a time of need? Starmer also seems only too willing to sell out British interests, whether it is to the European Union or Communist China. For Britian’s competitors and its enemies he is viewed as a pushover who crumbles at the first sign of pressure.
Under Keir Starmer there is a palpable sense of British decline. I cannot think of a time in the past several hundred years when Britain has appeared weaker. This truly is a low point for a great nation that once held sway over a quarter of the world.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise given that he has no real vision on the international stage, and is a willing prisoner of the Left’s globalist ideology: adoration of the European Union and the United Nations, deference to international courts, and support for supranationalism over national sovereignty.
He is a socialist with a sneering disregard for Britain’s illustrious past. For the woke Left, which Starmer exemplifies, the British Empire is a cause of shame and contrition, and in their eyes its legacy should be condemned and dismantled.
This is very much the approach as well from Starmer’s third-rate Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, who seems on a mission to atone for Britain’s past.
Both Starmer and Lammy are responsible for the Chagos Islands debacle, which has become a symbol of the pervasive anti-British self-loathing that exists in Labour-run Downing Street and the Foreign Office. The islands in the Indian Ocean, which are home to the vital Anglo-American military base of Diego Garcia, are being handed over to Mauritius, a close Chinese ally, following a ludicrous anti-British ruling from the International Court of Justice.
As I noted in my Congressional testimony on the matter earlier this month before the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, the Chagos surrender is the biggest betrayal of British national sovereignty in the modern era.
It is a major gift to Communist China at Britain’s expense and greatly undermines US strategic interests and NATO cohesion. It is also the worst foreign policy move by a British prime minister in decades and a knife in the back for the US/UK Special Relationship.
Starmer is the polar opposite of Trump who, whether you like him or not, leads the United States and the free world with the kind of conviction displayed in his strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme, Gardiner writes
To add insult to injury, British taxpayers will be saddled with a huge bill of up to £30 billion over the next 99 years as the UK pays Mauritius to lease Diego Garcia.
The entire deal is insane, and wrapped in a cocoon of post-imperial guilt of the kind that used to be the preserve of Left-wing university faculties but is now the dominant ideology at the heart of the British government.
The recently announced UK deal with the EU over Gibraltar is another appalling surrender, with Spain effectively handed control over the border of a key British Overseas Territory.
Instead of standing up to Brussels, Starmer is simply rolling over without a fight.
Spain’s socialist government, headed by its Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, has treated Gibraltar and British sovereignty with utter contempt, resorting to outright threats and bullying with the help of the European Commission. This is completely unacceptable and hugely insulting to the British citizens of Gibraltar.
We should now fear for the future of the Falklands under Starmer and his Labour government. If he is willing to hand over the Chagos Islands simply because an international court with questionable credibility issues a ruling, and he is willing to throw Gibraltar under the bus in the face of EU pressure, there can be little doubt he could start making concessions to Argentina over the Falklands.
Anything is possible with this Labour government, given its cavalier approach toward the defence of British sovereignty. This approach is amply demonstrated over Europe today, where the emphatic vote in 2016 by 17.4 million Britons to leave the EU is being trampled on daily by Starmer’s Remainer government.
Starmer has consistently kowtowed to the EU, and his recent deal with Brussels has sold out British fishermen, with hugely damaging implications for their livelihoods. His deal with the EU to bring the UK back into ‘dynamic alignment’ with Brussels on food safety and animal welfare means EU directives will once again be enforced in the UK. The European Court of Justice will have supremacy over British courts in these crucial areas.
Starmer’s pro-EU stance risks further undermining the vital Special Relationship with the United States.
Donald Trump has been generous towards the British PM by moving forward with a trade deal with the UK, despite Starmer’s efforts to ingratiate himself with Brussels. This is because Trump likes Britain and Brexit, not because he likes Starmer.
This goodwill from the Oval Office may not last, however.
There remains deep-seated distrust in the White House of Starmer’s socialist instincts and his pro-EU approach.
There has also been sharp condemnation of the failure of Starmer’s government to defend freedom of speech and conscience, with US Vice President JD Vance launching a stinging broadside in his speech in February at the Munich Security Conference against Labour Britain over the shocking arrest of a Christian military veteran for silently praying outside an abortion clinic.
In many respects, the US administration is a far bigger backer of Brexit than the British government itself, which is filled with politicians who voted against it.
We should be deeply concerned that if Labour is returned to power in 2029 for a second term it may well seek to overturn the democratic will of the British people expressed in the referendum vote and take Britain back into the European Union. The British people cannot trust Starmer on Brexit.
Nor can he be trusted by key British allies such as Israel.
Trump’s decisive action showed up what a truly gutless politician Starmer is, one who looks increasingly like a deer in the headlights rather than a roaring British lion, says Nile Gardiner
Keir Starmer has been strikingly weak on the Iranian threat to the West, and has done little to combat Tehran-backed Iranian groups operating inside the UK, as well as rising antisemitism on the streets of British cities.
Tellingly, Starmer’s government was not informed in advance by the Israelis of their planned air strikes against Iran – in marked contrast to the Trump administration, which was kept fully appraised of Israel’s imminent action.
The fact David Lammy had pledged to cooperate with the International Criminal Court over its arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will certainly not have engendered any trust in Labour in Jerusalem.
And on both the Russian and Chinese fronts, Starmer has hardly projected strength and resolve.
He has talked tough over the continuing war in Ukraine, declaring he is ‘ready and willing’ to put British troops on the ground alongside French forces in the event of a peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow.
The rhetoric, however, does not match the reality. It would be extremely difficult for the UK to deploy the manpower and resources required to deter another Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It simply does not have enough troops for a large-scale operation of this kind while also maintaining other commitments, including the defence of NATO member Baltic states.
Despite a lot of chest thumping, Starmer has not been convincing on reinforcing NATO, and has dragged his feet on outlining a concrete timetable for the UK to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence.
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As for Communist China, Starmer’s approach has been to kowtow to Beijing instead of confronting it.
His Labour government is about to move forward with the approval of China’s proposed ‘super embassy’ in the heart of London, which would undoubtedly be the nerve centre for a massive espionage operation against the UK.
This would be an incredibly risky move for a British government to take, and a highly provocative display of Chinese power in Europe.
It is hard to think of a single significant foreign policy or national security victory for Keir Starmer since he took office a year ago.
The only positive note, a trade agreement with the United States, was driven heavily by Washington and not London, with much of the foundations for the deal put in place by the previous Conservative governments.
Keir Starmer has no positive energy, vision or strategy for Britain on the world stage. He has offered only weakness, decline and a disregard for the sovereignty and interests of the British people.
His deeply unpopular Labour government has become an embarrassment, with the very real potential to cause deep-seated and potentially irreparable damage to the United Kingdom for decades to come.
Nile Gardiner is a former aide to Margaret Thatcher.
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