‘It's not an excuse but I was distracted': Keir Starmer on the benefits U-turn and his toughest week yet

Times

a day ago

It's Friday afternoon and my phone lights up. Sir Keir Starmer is on the line. This is the end of arguably the worst week of his premiership, with a backbench rebellion over disability benefit cuts forcing a humiliating government climbdown. The prime minister is calling to explain what went wrong. For the first time in a long series of conversations, he seems just a touch rattled.
'All these decisions are my decisions and I take ownership of them,' he says. 'My rule of leadership is, when things go well you get the plaudits; when things don't go well you carry the can. I take responsibility for all the decisions made by this government. I do not talk about staff and I'd much prefer it if everybody else didn't.'
He is referring to anonymous briefings that have aimed the blame for the welfare U-turn at Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister's chief political adviser, who has been accused of having misread the mood of the parliamentary Labour Party.
Rather, Starmer says the fault is his own: he has spent much of the past fortnight concentrating on foreign affairs instead of domestic matters, first at the G7 in Canada and then at the Nato meeting in the Netherlands, with a US bombing strike on Iran to deal with in between.
'I'm putting this as context rather than excuse: I was heavily focused on what was happening with Nato and the Middle East all weekend,' he says. 'I turned my attention fully to it [the welfare bill] when I got back from Nato on Wednesday night. Obviously in the course of the early part of this week we were busy trying to make sure Nato was a success.'
He adds: 'From the moment I got back from the G7, I went straight into a Cobra meeting. My full attention really bore down on this on Thursday. At that point we were able to move relatively quickly.'
He also acknowledges that the benefit cuts have not been well handled politically. 'I'd have liked to get to a better position with colleagues sooner than we did — that's for sure,' he says.
While he insists that there was 'a lot of outreach' over the bill to backbench Labour MPs, he admits that more should have been done. 'Would I rather have been able to get to a constructive package with colleagues earlier? Yeah, I would. [But] I believe in the world we live in, not the world we want to live in.'
The prime minister defends the U-turn, suggesting that it was a response to scrutiny and pushback from his party colleagues, which is part of the ordinary political process. 'This often happens,' he says. 'Things come to a head as the legislation comes into view, with a vote focusing the minds.'
He adds: 'If somebody makes powerful representations, then my instinct is to consider what's being said. Getting it right is more important than ploughing on with a package which doesn't necessarily achieve the desired outcome.'
In a previous conversation with me he angrily dismissed the suggestion, most notably chronicled in Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's book Get In, that it is in fact McSweeney who is controlling the political direction of the government. 'Total bollocks,' he said, the first time I've heard him swear. 'The reality is Morgan and I have been working together for many, many years, running up and down the pitch together.' He continued: 'That's a good working relationship. But I didn't buy anything in that book', before acknowledging he had not read it.
When I began interviewing Starmer in May, on a train rattling from Poland to Ukraine, his premiership had already reached a tricky point. His favourability ratings were at a record low of minus 46. The soft left of his party was increasingly restive. Polls were showing Nigel Farage's Reform UK on the rise. And the fundamental problem of this government, that it doesn't have enough money and it doesn't know where to get more from, continued to plague the prime minister.
By the time our interview on Friday concluded, five conversations later, he was surely looking back on the trickiness of May with nostalgia. A year on from his landslide election victory in July, Starmer's premiership appears to have reached a nadir after a string of U-turns on winter fuel payments, a grooming gangs inquiry and now disability benefits. Some Labour MPs are even calling for a 'regime change' of staff in Downing Street.
The distractions of foreign affairs have become an enduring theme of Starmer's first year. The world is in a state of dangerous flux, yet he's found a perverse form of succour, perhaps even relief, in his diplomatic work. Whereas on the domestic front, in the cauldron of Westminster, Whitehall, Fleet Street, he has bounced from one crisis to another.
It is perhaps appropriate, then, that our first interview took place on a trip to Kyiv to visit President Zelensky. It's where Starmer seemed happier.
A long passenger train chugs through Saturday night in western Ukraine, carrying the fate of Europe on board. President Macron, Friedrich Merz and Sir Keir Starmer, founding members of the 'coalition of the willing', are on their way home from a solidarity mission to visit President Zelensky in Kyiv.
In the British media carriage, sensibly located as far from the diplomatic action as possible, a couple of us are unwinding over a Polish lager. The prime minister arrives for a chat, wedging himself into a bunk bed. After almost a year in the job and now 62, Starmer has whiter hair, but the rest of him is broadly unchanged since we last met, just before the election: same navy/black dadwear, same air of earnest self-possession. He may have even lost a few pounds.
It's early May and the prime minister seems buoyant, having just wrapped up trade deals with India and America, two of the world's largest economies. 'Two deals in two days — you could make that your headline,' he says, almost plaintively.
Instead I offer him some beer in a plastic cup. 'No, thanks.' Perhaps some Yellow Tail chardonnay? Peer pressure kicks in. 'Go on then, just a small one.' He takes a few polite sips. We make the usual small talk — Arsenal, family, Arsenal — and then it's on to world affairs. Zelensky, he feels, has recovered from his February mauling in the Oval Office and is back on form.
After about ten minutes Starmer's hyperactive flacks start looking at their watches. 'I've got to go and see Emmanuel,' he explains. Would he like to take the rest of the Yellow Tail with him, as a gift to Monsieur le Président? 'I think that would probably sink Anglo-French relations,' he says with a grin.
This Ukraine trip is the first of three interviews I will conduct with Starmer to mark the anniversary of his election. From Kyiv to Downing Street to a technical college in Ipswich, I will spend several hours with the prime minister and his aides, trying to get a sense of how he views his first year in power.
Thus far the electorate is unimpressed by this government: many heads have already been turned by the siren call of Nigel Farage's Reform, which would thrash Labour in a general election according to the latest YouGov polling. At times, though, on divisive issues such as grooming gangs or winter fuel payments, he has seemed more like what Tony Benn used to call a 'weathercock' politician, buffeted by events rather than shaping them, lacking consistency and the political acumen to see around corners. But what's his theory of the case? What does Starmer think the path to success looks like from here? How has it been for him?
A year of global unrest, culminating in the Iran-Israel conflict, has frequently drawn Starmer away from his mission to fix Britain. 'I don't think he would have expected to spend so much time on foreign affairs,' says the former prime minister Gordon Brown. 'He's been an impressive ambassador, but I think he would probably prefer to be spending more time on the domestic agenda.'
Yet it's also on the chaotic world stage — war in Europe, trade rules ripped up in Washington, the liberal order fragmenting — that Starmer has found relief from what he sees as the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster.
This train, a juddering eight-hour journey between Przemysl in Poland and the Ukrainian capital, has become a rite of passage for the present generation of statesmen. The stakes are apparent the moment we arrive in Kyiv: the swarms of stone-faced security, the near reverence with which our delegation is treated. Britain's role in Ukraine is deeper than we fully acknowledge or publicise. But Zelensky knows all about it. As does Putin.
As they mingle at the baroque Mariinskyi Palace, Ukraine's official presidential residence, Europe's new famous five are a jumble of archetypes: Macron frantically tactile; Donald Tusk brooding and taciturn; Merz suitably sombre on the (many) occasions that Starmer mentions VE Day. And Zelensky, slightly haunted, new flecks of grey in his beard, but also full of bounce.
When he's not receiving unsolicited embraces, Starmer looks comfortable on this stage. He likes the bigness of it, the gravity, serious men engaging in serious affairs of state. Britain at the heart of it all, mattering. Unlike Israel and Gaza, which his friends have told me 'torments' him, he likes the moral clarity of Ukraine too. A war with an obvious good side, which we happen to be on. 'Aggression', he assures us, 'will never prevail on our continent.'
After a dizzying day of wreath-laying and cathedral-visiting we head to a Crimean restaurant in Kyiv, where the prime minister receives a standing ovation and a ceremonial plate. We repair to a curtained-off room for a chat. How does he find it, I wonder, standing in the spotlight of history? 'I don't do all this self-analysis bit,' he bristles impatiently. 'I thought you'd picked that up a year ago. You're still desperately trying to get in there. Come on.'
Some things haven't changed, then. A few weeks before our trip General Zaluzhny, Ukraine's pugnacious ambassador to London, told a conference that the era of the American security guarantee was over. Does Starmer agree? 'No, I profoundly don't,' he says. 'Nato is the most important security guarantee the world has ever seen. President Trump has committed to article 5 of Nato [each country will defend any that is attacked] — that was made clear to me … with him. His point, and he has a point, is that the burden-sharing between the US and Europe is not in the right place — I actually think he's right about that.'
Starmer's role as a statesman, at least as he perceives it, is not to imagine a radically different future but to manage the problems of the present so that we can sustain the privileges of the past. 'It now comes to me,' he says, 'to ensure that the peace I've enjoyed in my life is enjoyed by millions of people for decades to come.'
The bromance between Donald Trump and Starmer has been something of a surprise, helping secure the now sealed US-UK trade agreement. How did it happen? 'I made it my business to have dinner with him in September, at his request actually,' Starmer explains. 'I thought from that moment: this is someone I'll be able to do business with. We actually get along. I knew I had to build on that.'
It's not what many expected: the golf course impresario and the human rights barrister palling about merrily. 'There are many things people didn't expect or have confidently predicted would or wouldn't happen in my life,' Starmer says. 'Yards and yards of reportage saying this won't happen or that won't happen.'
It helps that Starmer can be far less stiff and strained in private. Does Trump make him laugh? 'Yeah. On a personal level we do get on and that's fine. We've got a straightforward relationship; there's a lot of respect and trust. We talk quite a lot. I think I understand what he's trying to achieve.'
Yet the limits of this relationship were also displayed last weekend, when Trump unilaterally launched a bombing raid on Iran, giving Starmer a cursory heads-up and contravening the prime minister's earlier assurances that 'nothing' the president had told him suggested such an intervention was coming. I followed up with Starmer last week to ask why he was wrongfooted. 'Look, the US is our closest ally and in relation to the action taken at the weekend, we were given due notice, as we would expect,' he told me. 'My focus is on de-escalation and getting the parties around the table.' At a certain point, Trump's volatility usually makes those who seek to hug him close look foolish. This, it seems, was Starmer's turn.
He has applied a similarly expedient model of diplomacy to the EU, which has, in fairness, also delivered a trade agreement, though not one beloved of the fishing industry. 'After a decade of Britain shrugging its shoulders or insulting Europe, we're in a better place,' he says. 'I much prefer to be serious and pragmatic rather than do the performative art, which doesn't actually get you very far.' This is Starmer's theory of leadership distilled onto a flashcard: pragmatic, serious, respectful; ignore the noise, focus on the deliverables. Show not tell.
And with that I leave the prime minister to his chebureki and chilled red. It's time for us both to head home to London, where everything is about to go horribly wrong.
You don't actually sleep much on a Ukrainian sleeper train, so after two nights of jolting over the Caspian steppe, I relish returning home on Sunday May 11 for eight hours in my own bed. Starmer, on the other hand, is woken in the middle of the night and informed that his family home in Kentish Town, north London, where his sister-in-law has been staying with her family, has just been firebombed, along with his old car. The following morning he arrives at the office at 7.30am for an early meeting before a key speech on immigration, in which he goes on to echo the language of Enoch Powell by warning that Britain risks becoming an 'island of strangers', provoking media outrage. Private anxieties and political blunders — the contrast with Kyiv could hardly be more stark.
Three weeks later I am ushered into Starmer's Downing Street study for another audience. The headlines are a screaming mess of winter fuel payment U-turns and police cuts. Yet the prime minister seems calm and relaxed on the sofa where he does much of his work, in the room that's no longer referred to as the 'Thatcher Room' and no longer has a large portrait of Margaret Thatcher in it, as Starmer found it a bit off-putting. We're served a large bottle of Camden Hells lager each, with a bowl of ready salted crisps to share.
The 'island of strangers' remark, I am told, was unintentional and a mistake. Starmer wasn't aware of the similarity to Powell's famous comments that Britain's white population would find themselves 'strangers in their own land' if immigration were not checked. 'That's not me,' he insists. 'I wouldn't have gone near it if I had known. I didn't know that was used by Powell. If I'd known that, I would never have said it.'
He describes his 'frustration' that the furore following his remarks 'distracted' from the message of the speech, which was that the country needed to take immigration more seriously. He again points out that other issues were on his mind when the speech was made, including the Kentish Town firebombing, which took place while his sister-in-law and her partner and young child were in the house.
'Distraction No 1 was the firebombing of the house that morning,' he says. 'We were in the middle of a briefing from the police team when I stepped out to do the press conference. We hadn't finished the briefing, so afterwards I stepped straight back into it. It did play on my mind, if I'm honest. [Though] I don't want to overdo it.'
The second distraction, he said, was the trip to Ukraine. 'In an ordinary situation you'd go through the stuff a couple of days before,' he said. 'But because we were in and out of Ukraine, there was a lot of focus on that trip.'
The news of the firebombing upset the entire family. 'It was playing on my mind all week, frankly. Not least because Vic [his wife] was very troubled by what happened. It could have been a very different story. It really shook her up and it shook me up. Now I'm not going to go out there and bleat and all that. [But] it's clearly targeted.'
Does he actually enjoy this job, I wonder, fighting one fire after the next for 18 hours a day? 'Yes. I wouldn't swap a single day of this to go back to opposition,' he says. Not a single one? 'Not a single one. That frustration of opposition was deep.'
The part of being prime minister that he finds most difficult — and most difficult to talk about — is when it bumps into his private life, which he guards with unusual ferocity. 'When it touches on my family, it's the only time I really get … among the reasons that the whole stuff about [free] concerts and clothes and stuff, when it started dragging Vic in, that was when I personally did get … anything that drags the family in, a bit like this firebomb stuff that's been going on … that is when I really worry. Not worry; it affects me in a different way.'
Four men of Ukrainian and Romanian origin have been arrested on charges of arson with intent to endanger life. 'It's always for me the clash of the private and the public,' Starmer says. 'I'm quite good at 'This is what my job is. I've got to get on with it'. [But] it's those moments when you're in the public domain and something's happening. When we were doing the [Labour] leadership race and Vic's mum died. Equally with these firebombings, it's the family bit of it … that's when I get really uncomfortable.'
Another moment when the personal and political clashed was in December, when his brother, Nick, died from lung cancer on Boxing Day, aged 60. Starmer has spoken in the past of Nick's struggles with learning difficulties and settling down in life. Of how his father, Rodney, would tell him that, given the challenges he faced, Nick achieving an entry-level engineering qualification was just as impressive as his brother's glittering legal career. 'I felt protective of him,' Starmer says. 'He really struggled. He didn't learn easily.'
Nick received a terminal diagnosis 18 months before his death. 'I knew he was going to die,' Starmer says. 'I also knew I had to protect him. He's a very vulnerable man.' Fearing media intrusion, he secretly visited his brother at a Leeds hospital. 'I went pretty well every week, through a back door. I went up in a sort of porter's lift-shaft thing into a cordoned-off part of intensive care. I constantly visited him without him knowing. And so I knew what was going to happen. But it still hits you hard. It hits you like a bus. It's my brother. This has been a constant. Every day. We shared bunk beds. Until the day I went to university, I was in a bunk bed in a small room with my brother. And somebody has died. And it's public knowledge. And my sisters are grieving. And they're very private individuals. So all of that is hard to handle.'
He dealt with his grief by compartmentalising, trying to 'carve out some space' to mourn, but one doesn't really get the sense he has had much space at all. 'The first duty is to run the country, and in the end that takes precedence,' he says. 'Just as it has done many times with the kids.'
Life in Downing Street for the Starmers began with a cancelled holiday to Sicily because of last summer's riots and has mostly continued in that vein. 'They're incredibly forgiving,' Starmer says of his children, a boy of 16 and a girl of 14. 'I'm not pleading any great victimhood here. This is what happens. But I am equally determined to carve out the time for them. I had kids because I wanted to see them and enjoy them growing up.'
When our interview concludes, his son will arrive home from kickboxing. 'I always cook for him when he comes in,' Starmer says. 'There are just little bits of routines that I try to ring-fence. If I've got 15 minutes for lunch and the kids happen to be at home, I'll go up to the flat and see them. Or they'll come down to the office. So our daughter brings her kitten down, at least for this week, and wanders around with a cup of milk.'
And what about Vic? A year ago Starmer assured me that his wife, who is an occupational health worker for the NHS, wouldn't be giving any interviews if they made it to Downing Street, which is one election commitment he has delivered on thus far. How has their marriage responded to the strain? 'I mean, you can't just take Vic out for a nice dinner necessarily, because you have to shut the restaurant down,' he says. 'We've had a lot of nights that we thought we were doing x and we ended up not doing x. But equally we've got nights where suddenly we'll nip out for a drink, even if it's only one hour, just the two of us on our own. To plan it is to doom it. But if she's back and I'm back, we'll go and do something. Or go up to where her mum's memorial stone is and go for a walk.'
His commitment to family is entirely relatable, but Starmer's almost parodic normality doesn't seem to be doing him any favours in the polls. His favourability ratings are at a Hadean low, currently at a record minus 46 on YouGov. Does the onslaught of criticism really not get to him?
'I don't obsess about it,' he says. 'I try to make it water off a duck's back as far as possible. Because otherwise I think you lose any ability to focus and you just spend your whole time worrying about it.'
Labour may be trailing Reform in the polls but Starmer thinks Farage's elaborate promises, his lack of seriousness, will catch up with him. 'He's a good communicator but he hasn't got any answers,' he says. 'His mask slipped just two weeks ago when he made £80 billion worth of unfunded spending commitments. It exposed him, I think. And it shows that as he moves from easy rhetoric to detail, he's going to increasingly be found out.'
Kemi Badenoch he seems less concerned about. 'It is a challenge for her,' he says. 'I don't want to be patronising, because it's not about her. It is really difficult to be leader of the opposition when your party has just lost badly. It is a really hard job.'
Starmer processes his unpopularity through the prism of feeling persistently underestimated. He views much of our political media as loud and unserious but one senses a slight class inflection too, a feeling that we consistently undervalue this (sort of) working-class grammar school striver who wasn't raised to dazzle and declaim.
The difficulty, which he acknowledges, is that this government has struggled to convey a compelling story about what it's actually up to. We've had lots of pain — national insurance rises, inheritance tax for farmers — but in pursuit of what? 'It's the challenge … getting our story across,' he says. 'This is a reflection on ourselves. If I was to list to you all the things we've done, it's a big long list of things. [But] how do we tell the story of what we've done? How do we make sure it's actually felt by working people?'
With two big jobs in his past (director of public prosecutions and leader of the opposition), Starmer believes he has a successful model that he can apply to fixing Britain, if only he can get the message across. 'When I came into the Crown Prosecution Service there was a five-year term and I knew what I needed to do. We changed the Crown Prosecution Service,' he says. 'I came into the Labour Party knowing what I had to do, which was change it. People said, 'You're not going to be able to do that — you're not very popular; the party doesn't like it.' And then we lost in Hartlepool in 2021 and everyone said, 'You're never going to make up the ground. How can you possibly turn it around?' And I knew what we had to do. So this is not unfamiliar territory to me. I know what I was elected to do. A decade of national renewal. I know it will take time. I will stay utterly focused on what I've got to deliver.'
Turning Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party into an election juggernaut in four years was undeniably impressive. Turning Britain around, however, is a task of a different magnitude altogether.
At a crowded, musty workshop at Suffolk New College in Ipswich, fifty or so unsuspecting students from the technical college have been corralled in to hear the prime minister speak. I sit down next to three young plumbing apprentices, who inquire about my impressions of Ipswich.
It's June 10 and Starmer is splurging ahead of the upcoming spending review, getting the good news out first. Today it's a £14.2 billion investment in Sizewell C, a nuclear power plant planned for the Suffolk coastline. Rebooting our nuclear power programme, he says, is essential for Britain's future. 'No more dithering, no more delay, no more being unclear about what we're going to do.'
But the students should also think about the jobs Sizewell 'might mean for them': good, well-paid, local jobs. Starmer, whose father was, famously, a toolmaker, really does care about this kind of thing: hard work, technical expertise, the dignity of having a useful skill and being rewarded for it. His manner may be strained but his belief is passionately sincere. What did the three plumbing lads think? 'He's a twat,' one says. 'I'm not going to be able to buy a house until I'm 30.'
And herein lies the root of the problem. Starmer assures us he has a long-term vision for Britain: year one, fix the foundations and stabilise the national finances. Tough but necessary. Phase two, investment, put the money into 'big, chunky' projects such as Sizewell or defence spending. Phase three, the eagerly awaited though vaguely adumbrated 'decade of national renewal'. But even if this plan somehow works, it will be gradual and methodical, demanding patience from a restless electorate.
On his oft-made promise to smash the gangs and stop the migrant boats crossing the Channel, for example, what Starmer asks for again is patience. We're now seeing more crossings than before he came into office. 'It takes time,' he says. 'This is an operating model that has been there for a number of years. I genuinely believe we can take on these gangs. We've got much better agreements in place for international co-operation, in terms of returns, and some pretty high-level arrests. So things are going on. There are human frustrations, but we are massively stepping in the right direction.'
Is this gradualism enough, though? Is it radical enough? This is the question on my mind as we pile into a first-class train carriage for an interview on the journey back to London. 'I think so,' Starmer says. 'If you look at these big commitments we're making … Look at Sizewell. It is pretty extraordinary. We haven't had a Sizewell project since 1995. That's ridiculous. And so that clarity, that commitment, is huge. The central thrust is still on growth. But there are phases to this. This is very key. The constraints are huge. We are financially in a very bad place in terms of where we are on borrowing.'
The problem Starmer has, on his path to a decade of national renewal, is that he is trapped in a fiscal cage. Fourteen years of Conservative government, Brexit and Covid left the country in an impecunious mess, with immigration and the welfare bill both soaring. There's very little money. But Labour's 'Ming vase' election strategy, boxing itself in with promises not to raise income tax and national insurance in order to avoid allegations of profligacy, also means that Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, don't have any big fundraising levers to pull. Our population is ageing, so welfare costs will continue to spiral, and allowing young migrants in to juice the numbers is no longer politically viable. Defence spending must rise to meet security demands, but our debt-to-GDP ratio is already nearly 100 per cent, the highest level since the 1960s. Barring stupendous economic growth, tax will have to go up.
It's a fiendish puzzle. Yet Starmer has struggled with even modest attempts to slash the welfare bill, U-turning on winter fuel payments and backing down after the rebellion by his own MPs over proposed cuts to disability benefits. Both have exposed political weakness. What chance then of ever cutting the triple lock on state pensions, which is costing us £11 billion a year and counting, and will have to go eventually? Why not start making the argument now? 'Because we're committed to the triple lock,' he says. 'I mean, it's in our manifesto. So that's a hardwired commitment that we've made.' The politics, or the electorate, won't allow him to go there.
Instead, he wishes to be judged on what Labour ministers describe as 'tangible' improvements. 'Fundamentally, this government is going to need to show that it can force the state to deliver for working people,' says Nick Thomas-Symonds, the paymaster general and an ally of Starmer's. 'It's the tangible difference in people's lives — that will tell its own story.' That means NHS waiting lists coming down, potholes being fixed, bins collected and high streets revived. Big investment projects will be starting to bear fruit, rejuvenating local economies. Things will feel just a bit better.
'Keir needs time to show that his policies are working,' Gordon Brown says. 'He's on a sort of five-year timetable to achieve things bit by bit. He's reluctant to make extravagant claims when he wants people to see the results of what he's doing and let them make a judgment. In that context, a year is a short time.'
What we're engaging in, then, is a kind of grand national experiment in the parable of the tortoise and the hare. It may be that Starmer is not radical or flexible enough in thought or action to meet the moment he's been presented with, an analogue politician lost in a digital age. The systems he's trying to shore up, from Nato to the NHS, may be part of an ancien régime that is irreparably broken. But he knows no other way. So he will keep buggering on. 'For the best part of the last 15 years I've had noises off saying, 'You can't do it. You won't do it,'' he says. 'And every time, so far, we've proved them wrong. And I'm intending to do that again.'