Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer holds a press conference at the end of the NATO 75th anniversary summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC on July 11, 2024. Agence France-Presse
LONDON — Britain’s Keir Starmer could hardly have asked for a better first week as prime minister, from hobnobbing with fellow world leaders to England’s run to the final of the European football championships.
But a rebellion brewing within his ruling Labour party over child welfare payments and a prisons overcrowding crisis forcing the early release of offenders means the honeymoon is unlikely to last.
Starmer hit the ground running upon entering Downing Street last Friday as Labour returned to power after 14 years following a landslide general election victory over Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.
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In his first few days, he made bold ministerial appointments, held a press conference at his official residence and delivered his first speech in parliament as premier.
Starmer then jetted off to Washington for a fortuitously timed NATO summit where he was able to burnish his statesman credentials alongside US President Joe Biden and other world leaders.
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“He has wanted to do this for so long. Just getting on with it is a release and a relief for him,” Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin told foreign media in London on Thursday.
‘Reset’
In Washington, Starmer declared he was “determined to renew Britain’s place on the world stage”, noting “there was a sense after Brexit that the UK had become too inward looking”.
He pledged to “reset” Britain’s relationship with Europe and reaffirmed UK support for Ukraine during a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Starmer also backed the cognitive abilities of the embattled Biden, who treated his British counterpart to golden photo opportunities in the Oval Office and on the White House balcony.
“Sitting next to Biden in the White House, he doesn’t look like an unequal,” said Baldwin.
Starmer’s three-day trip to the US capital coincided with England’s dramatic late win against the Netherlands in the Euro 2024 semi-final on Wednesday.
The football-crazy Starmer, who presented Biden with a shirt of his favourite team Arsenal, said the UK would “certainly mark the occasion” if England wins Sunday’s final in Berlin — a match he is due to attend.
Victory over Spain would likely see Starmer welcome the England team to Downing Street, continuing the feel-good factor in the UK’s largest country — although not so much in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
An Ipsos poll published on Friday suggested Starmer is enjoying a bounce in popularity, as Britain largely breathes a sigh of relief at the end of a tumultuous period of Tory rule.
The survey, carried out last Friday and Saturday, found that 40 percent of voters had a favourable view of the new UK leader, up six points from the final week of the campaign.
“These findings suggest something of a honeymoon period for Keir Starmer, with… Britons more likely to expect his government to change things for the better than worse,” said Ipsos director of politics Keiran Pedley.
Dire inheritance
Labour’s priority is economic growth and it quickly launched a National Wealth Fund to boost private investment and ended the Tories’ ban on new onshore wind farms.
Starmer was praised for appointing ministers from outside, notably Covid-era advisor Patrick Vallance as science minister and international law expert Richard Hermer as attorney general.
He was also hailed for naming justice reform advocate James Timpson as prisons minister.
“The new government has clearly made a strong start,” Patrick Diamond, a former Downing Street policy advisor, told AFP.
Much of that start has also focused on blaming the Tories for a dire inheritance. Starmer’s government has commissioned a probe into public finances and a “broken” state-run National Health Service.
The government announced Friday that thousands of prisoners will be released early from near-capacity jails, with Starmer — a former chief public prosecutor — blaming the “complete failure” of the Conservatives for the situation.
Head of state King Charles III will outline his government’s legislative proposals at the State Opening of Parliament on Wednesday, before Starmer plays host to a summit of European leaders at Blenheim Palace on Thursday.
Starmer is expected to resist pressure from some of his own MPs to remove a controversial two-child benefit cap.
“The new government needs to be careful that its public narrative is not too gloomy,” warned Diamond.
“If all the talk is of failure there is a risk that the hope and optimism engendered by the election result dissipates.”