4 July 2025, 11:34

By Andrew Marr

One year on, and they are a puzzle, Keir Starmer and his government.

The Prime Minister has done well abroad – forging a good relationship with Donald Trump, against all the odds, doing trade deals with the US, EU and India, sticking solidly alongside Ukraine and building support for that embattled country.

We often discount this, and Starmer is mocked in Westminster as “never here Keir”; but consider how much time he spent trying to de-escalate the Israel-Iran conflict to avoid Britain being drawn in, with our bases at Cyprus and elsewhere.

In a parallel world where this war got out of control, and the oil price hugely spiked, we would be in a position today of utter disaster… But it didn’t happen, so we don’t talk about it.

At home, of course, it’s a very different picture.

Even if the cause was purely personal, the spectacle of a sobbing Chancellor in the Commons the day after the welfare cuts were stopped in the track by angry Labour MPs will go down as the defining image of the government, one year on.

It isn’t enough to blame Rachel Reeves for what’s gone wrong, although the winter fuel payment cut was an early and definitive mistake.

She has been brutally constrained by the bond markets, in a generally suspicious mood ever since the Liz Truss experiment.

A “normal” Labour government would be borrowing........

© LBC