Latest news with #VictoriaStarmer
The Sun
12 hours ago
- Politics
- The Sun
Sir Keir Starmer says his sister-in-law could have been killed when his house was firebombed
SIR KEIR Starmer has said his sister-in-law could have been killed when his house was firebombed. The Prime Minister has revealed his wife's sister was luckily still awake when the alleged arson attack took place in the early hours. 2 Sir Keir told The Observer his family were 'shaken up'. He said: 'She happened to still be awake, so she heard the noise and got the fire brigade. 'But it could have been a different story.' The incident came just hours before he was due to give a press conference, which he considered cancelling due to the impact on his family, including wife Victoria. He said: 'Vic was really shaken up — as, in truth, was I. 'It was just a case of reading the speech and getting through it somehow so I could get back to them.' The blaze in Kentish Town, North London, on May 12 was the most recent of three apparent arson attacks on property and cars linked to the PM. A car was set ablaze on the same street days earlier, and converted flats were targeted in nearby Islington. Three men who have been charged in connection with the attacks will face trial in April next year. Moment flames engulf car outside Keir Starmer's home as man arrested over 'arson' attack on TWO properties linked to PM 2
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Starmer's stormy first year ends in crisis - now he faces a bigger battle to turn it around
By the time polls closed at 10pm on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party knew they were likely to return to government - even if they could not quite bring themselves to believe it. For Sir Keir Starmer, reminiscing 10 months later in an interview with me, it was an "incredible moment". Instantly, he said, he was "conscious of the sense of responsibility". And yes, he confessed, a little annoyed that his landslide victory was not quite as big as Sir Tony Blair's had been in 1997. "I'm hugely competitive," the prime minister said. "Whether it's on the football pitch, whether it is in politics or any other aspect of life." Sir Keir watched the exit poll with a small group of advisers as well as his wife, Victoria, and his two teenaged children. Even in that moment of unsurpassable accomplishment, this deeply private prime minister was caught between the jubilation of his aides and the more complex reaction of his children, who knew their lives were about to change forever. Looking back, the prime minister said, he would tell himself: "Don't watch it with your family - because it did have a big impact on my family, and I could see that in my children." It's important to remember how sunny the mood in the Labour Party was at that moment - because the weather then turned stormy with remarkable speed. As the prime minister marks a year in office next week - which he will spend grappling with crises at home and abroad - British politics finds itself at an inflection point, where none of the old rules can be taken for granted. So, why exactly was Sir Keir's political honeymoon so short-lived? And can he turn things around? Many members of the new cabinet had never been to Downing Street until they walked up to the famous black door on 5 July to be appointed. Why would they have been? The 14 turbulent years of opposition for the Labour Party meant that few had any experience of government. This was a deficiency of which Sir Keir and his team were acutely aware. As the leader of the opposition, he had spent significant time in 'Privy Council' - that's to say, confidential, meetings with civil servants to understand what was happening in Ukraine and the Middle East. He also sought knowledge from the White House. Jake Sullivan, then US President Joe Biden's National Security Adviser, told me that he spoke to the future prime minister "every couple of months" to help him "make sense of what was happening". "I shared with him our perspective on events in the Middle East, as well as in Ukraine and in other parts of the world," says Sullivan. "I thought he asked trenchant, focused, sharp questions. I thought he was on point. "I thought he got to the heart of the matter, the larger issue of where all of these things were going and what was driving them. I was impressed with him." Domestic preparations were not as smooth. For some, especially on the left of the Labour Party, this government's difficulties began with an over-cautious election campaign. Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the trade union Unite, told me that "everyday people [were] looking for change with a big C. They were not looking for managerialism". It's a criticism with which Pat McFadden, a senior cabinet minister, having run the campaign, is wearily familiar. "We had tried other strategies to varying degrees in 2015, 2017, 2019, many other campaigns previously - and they'd lost. "I had one job. To win." Having made his name as a prominent member of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, Sir Keir won the party leadership in 2020 offering Labour members a kind of Corbynism without Corbyn. But before long he broke decisively with his predecessor. In the campaign this meant not a long list of promises, but a careful approach. Reassurance was the order of the day: at the campaign's heart, a focus on what Labour wouldn't do: no increase in income tax, national insurance or VAT. Yet a big part of preparing for government was not just the question of what this government would do, but how it would drive the government system. For that, Sir Keir turned to Sue Gray. Having led the Partygate investigation into Boris Johnson, Gray was already unusually high-profile for an impartial civil servant. Her close colleagues were stunned when in 2023 she agreed to take up a party political role as Sir Keir's chief of staff. "It was a source of enormous controversy within the civil service," says Simon Case, who until a few months ago as cabinet secretary was head of the civil service. Sue Gray's task was to use her decades of experience of the Whitehall machine to bring order to Sir Keir's longstanding team. She started work in September 2023, and the grumblings about her work began to reach me weeks, or perhaps even days, later. Those in the team she joined had expected her to bring organisational clarity. Tensions came when she involved herself in political questions too. Gray also deliberately re-prioritised the voices of elected politicians in the shadow cabinet over unelected advisers. Questions about what exactly her role should be were never quite resolved, in part because Rishi Sunak called the general election sooner than Labour had expected. Gray spent the campaign in a separate office from the main team, working with a small group on plans for the early days in government. Yet those back in Labour HQ fretted that, from what little they gleaned, that work was inadequate. A few days before the election those rumours reached me. I WhatsApped a confidant of Sir Keir to ask what they had heard of the preparation for government. "Don't ask," came the reply. "I am too worried to discuss it." What is unquestionable is that any prime minister would have struggled with the backdrop Sir Keir inherited. Simon Case described to me how, on 5 July just after Sir Keir had made his first speech on the steps of No 10, he had thwacked a sleepless new prime minister with "the heavy mallet of reality". "I don't think there are many incoming prime ministers who'd faced such challenging circumstances," he said, referring to both the country's economic situation and wars around the world. The King's Speech on 17 July unveiled a substantial programme, making good on manifesto promises: rail nationalisation, planning reform, clean energy investment. But those hoping for a rabbit out of the hat, a defining surprise, were disappointed. In so many crucial areas — social care, child poverty, industrial strategy — the government's instinct was to launch reviews and consultations, rather than to declare a decisive direction. As cabinet secretary, Case could see what was happening — or not happening — across the whole of government. "There were some elements where not enough thinking had been done," he said. "There were areas where, sitting in the centre of government, early in a new regime, the prime minister and his team, including me as his sort of core team, knew what we wanted to do, but we weren't communicating that effectively across all of government." Not just communication within government: for us journalists there were days in that early period where it was utterly unclear what this new government wanted its story to be. That made those early announcements, which did come, stand out even more: none more so than Chancellor Rachel Reeves's announcement on 29 July that she would means-test the winter fuel payment. It came in a speech primarily about the government's parlous economic inheritance. That is not what it is remembered for. Some in government admit that they expected a positive response to Reeves's radical frankness about what the government could and could not afford to do. Yet it sat in isolation - a symbol of this new government's economic priorities, with the Budget still three months away. Louise Haigh, then the transport secretary, remembered: "It came so early and it hung on its own as such a defining policy for so long that in so many voters' minds now, that is the first thing they think about when they think about this Labour government and what it wants to do and the kinds of decisions it wants to make." The policy lasted precisely one winter. Sir Keir and his chancellor have argued in recent weeks that they were able to change course because of a stabilising economy. McFadden was more direct about the U-turn. "If I'm being honest, I think the reaction to it since the decision was announced was probably stronger than we thought," he admits. At the same time the chancellor stood up to announce the winter fuel cuts, news was unfolding of a horrific attack in Southport. Misinformation about who had carried out the attack fuelled the first mass riots in this country since 2011, when Sir Keir had been the director of public prosecutions. Given the nature of the crisis, the prime minister was well placed to respond. "As a first crisis, it was dealing with a bit of the machinery of government that he instinctively understood - policing, courts, prisons," Case says. Sir Keir's response was practical and pragmatic — making the judicial system flow faster meant that by mid-August at least 200 rioters had already been sentenced, most jailed with an average term of two years. But in a way that was not quite clear at the time, the riots spawned what has become one of the defining attacks on the prime minister from the right: that of 'two-tier Keir'. The idea that some rioters were treated more harshly than other kinds of protesters had been morphed over time into a broader accusation about who and what the prime minister stood for. Sir Keir had cancelled his family holiday to deal with the riots. Exhausted, he ended the summer dealing with questions about his personal integrity in what became known as 'freebiegate'. Labour tiptoed cautiously through its first year - will it now decide to escape its own shadow? Why Labour is strengthening ties with China after years of rollercoaster relations Britain's energy bills problem - and why firms are paid huge sums to stop producing power Most of the gifts for which he was being criticised - clothing, glasses, concert tickets - had been accepted before the election but Sir Keir was prime minister now. Case told me there was a "naivety" about the greater scrutiny that came with leading the country. Perhaps more than that, there was a naivety in No 10 about how Sir Keir was seen. Here was a man elected in large part because of a crisis of trust in politics. He had presented himself as different. Telling voters that he had followed the rules was to miss the point — they thought the rules themselves were bust. By the winter of 2024, the sense of a government failing to get a grip of itself or a handle on the public mood, had grown. A chorus of off-the-record criticism, much of it strikingly personal, threatened to overwhelm the government. There were personal ambitions and tensions at play, but more and more insiders - some of them fans of Gray initially - were telling me that the way in which Sir Keir's chief of staff was running government was structurally flawed, with the system simply not working properly. Gray announced in early October that she had resigned because she risked becoming a "distraction". In reality, Sir Keir had sacked her after some of his closest aides warned him he risked a mutiny if he did not. Sue Gray was approached both for an interview and for her response to her critics but declined. To the end she retained some supporters in the cabinet including Louise Haigh. "I felt desperately sorry for her," she says. "It was just a really, really cruel way to treat someone who'd already been so traduced by the Tories - and then [was] traduced by our side as well." Sir Keir appointed Gray. He empowered Gray. And he dispensed with Gray. This was the prime minister correcting his own mistakes - an episode which came at a high political price. Yet on the world stage the prime minister continued to thrive, winning praise across political divides in the UK and abroad. Jake Sullivan, Biden's adviser, was impressed by Sir Keir's handling of US President Donald Trump, describing the Oval Office meeting where the prime minister brandished an invitation from the King as "the best I've seen in terms of a leader in these early weeks going to sit down with the current president". It's an irony that it is Sir Keir, who made his reputation trying to thwart Brexit, who has found for the UK its most defined diplomatic role of the post-Brexit era — close to the US, closer than before to Europe, at the fore of the pro-Ukraine alliance, striking trade deals with India and others. And it has provided him with something more elusive too: a story — a narrative of a confident, pragmatic leader stepping up on the world stage, acting as a bridge between other countries in fraught times. The risk, brought into sharp relief during the Israel-Iran conflict in recent days, is that Trump is too unpredictable for such a role to be a stable one. The international arena has sharpened Sir Keir's choices domestically as well. Even while making welfare cuts that have displeased so many in his party, the prime minister has a clearer and more joined-up argument about prioritising security in all its forms: through work, through economic prudence, through defence of the realm. And yet, for plenty of voters Sir Keir has found definition to his government's direction too late. Labour's poor performance last month in the local elections plus defeat at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were a blow to Sir Keir and his team. It's far from unheard of for a governing party to lose a by-election, but to lose it to Reform UK on the same night that Nigel Farage's party hoovered up councils across England made this a distinctively new political moment. Two days afterwards, Paul Ovenden, Sir Keir's strategy director, circulated a memo to Downing Street aides, which I've obtained. It called for a "relentless focus on the new centre ground in British politics". The crucial swing voters, Ovenden wrote, "are the middle-age, working class, economically squeezed voters that we persuaded in the 2024 election campaign. Many of them voted for us in 2024 thinking we would fix the cost of living, fix the NHS, and reduce migration… we need to become more ruthless in pursuing those outcomes". For more than 100 of Starmer's own MPs, including many of those elected for the first time in that landslide a year ago, the main priority was ruthlessly dismantling the government's welfare reforms - plunging the prime minister as he approaches his first anniversary into his gravest political crisis yet. The stakes were beyond high. For the prime minister to have backed down to avoid defeat on this so soon after the winter fuel reversal raises questions about his ability to get his way on plenty else besides. So, if this first year has done anything, it has clarified the stakes. This is not just a prime minister and a Labour Party hoping to win a second term. They are trying to prove to a tetchy and volatile country that not only do they get their frustration with politics, but that they can fix it too. None of that will be possible when profound policy disagreements are on public display. Starmer's Stormy Year: A year on from the landslide election win, the BBC's Henry Zeffman talks to insiders about the challenges Labour has faced in government (BBC Radio 4, from 30 June 2025) Top picture credit: PA and Getty Images BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
BBC News
a day ago
- Politics
- BBC News
As Starmer's first year ends in crisis, now comes a bigger battle
By the time polls closed at 10pm on 4 July 2024, the Labour Party knew they were likely to return to government - even if they could not quite bring themselves to believe Sir Keir Starmer, reminiscing 10 months later in an interview with me, it was an "incredible moment". Instantly, he said, he was "conscious of the sense of responsibility". And yes, he confessed, a little annoyed that his landslide victory was not quite as big as Sir Tony Blair's had been in 1997."I'm hugely competitive," the prime minister said. "Whether it's on the football pitch, whether it is in politics or any other aspect of life."Sir Keir watched the exit poll with a small group of advisers as well as his wife, Victoria, and his two teenaged children. Even in that moment of unsurpassable accomplishment, this deeply private prime minister was caught between the jubilation of his aides and the more complex reaction of his children, who knew their lives were about to change back, the prime minister said, he would tell himself: "Don't watch it with your family - because it did have a big impact on my family, and I could see that in my children." It's important to remember how sunny the mood in the Labour Party was at that moment - because the weather then turned stormy with remarkable the prime minister marks a year in office next week - which he will spend grappling with crises at home and abroad - British politics finds itself at an inflection point, where none of the old rules can be taken for why exactly was Sir Keir's political honeymoon so short-lived? And can he turn things around? Where Sir Keir's difficulties began Many members of the new cabinet had never been to Downing Street until they walked up to the famous black door on 5 July to be appointed. Why would they have been? The 14 turbulent years of opposition for the Labour Party meant that few had any experience of was a deficiency of which Sir Keir and his team were acutely the leader of the opposition, he had spent significant time in 'Privy Council' - that's to say, confidential, meetings with civil servants to understand what was happening in Ukraine and the Middle East. He also sought knowledge from the White House. Jake Sullivan, then US President Joe Biden's National Security Adviser, told me that he spoke to the future prime minister "every couple of months" to help him "make sense of what was happening"."I shared with him our perspective on events in the Middle East, as well as in Ukraine and in other parts of the world," says Sullivan. "I thought he asked trenchant, focused, sharp questions. I thought he was on point."I thought he got to the heart of the matter, the larger issue of where all of these things were going and what was driving them. I was impressed with him." Domestic preparations were not as smooth. For some, especially on the left of the Labour Party, this government's difficulties began with an over-cautious election campaign. Sharon Graham, the general secretary of the trade union Unite, told me that "everyday people [were] looking for change with a big C. They were not looking for managerialism".It's a criticism with which Pat McFadden, a senior cabinet minister, having run the campaign, is wearily familiar. "We had tried other strategies to varying degrees in 2015, 2017, 2019, many other campaigns previously - and they'd lost."I had one job. To win." Breaking away from Corbynism Having made his name as a prominent member of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet, Sir Keir won the party leadership in 2020 offering Labour members a kind of Corbynism without Corbyn. But before long he broke decisively with his the campaign this meant not a long list of promises, but a careful approach. Reassurance was the order of the day: at the campaign's heart, a focus on what Labour wouldn't do: no increase in income tax, national insurance or VAT. Yet a big part of preparing for government was not just the question of what this government would do, but how it would drive the government that, Sir Keir turned to Sue led the Partygate investigation into Boris Johnson, Gray was already unusually high-profile for an impartial civil servant. Her close colleagues were stunned when in 2023 she agreed to take up a party political role as Sir Keir's chief of staff."It was a source of enormous controversy within the civil service," says Simon Case, who until a few months ago as cabinet secretary was head of the civil Gray's task was to use her decades of experience of the Whitehall machine to bring order to Sir Keir's longstanding started work in September 2023, and the grumblings about her work began to reach me weeks, or perhaps even days, later. Those in the team she joined had expected her to bring organisational clarity. Tensions came when she involved herself in political questions too. Gray also deliberately re-prioritised the voices of elected politicians in the shadow cabinet over unelected about what exactly her role should be were never quite resolved, in part because Rishi Sunak called the general election sooner than Labour had spent the campaign in a separate office from the main team, working with a small group on plans for the early days in government. Yet those back in Labour HQ fretted that, from what little they gleaned, that work was inadequate.A few days before the election those rumours reached me. I WhatsApped a confidant of Sir Keir to ask what they had heard of the preparation for government."Don't ask," came the reply. "I am too worried to discuss it." A lack of decisive direction What is unquestionable is that any prime minister would have struggled with the backdrop Sir Keir Case described to me how, on 5 July just after Sir Keir had made his first speech on the steps of No 10, he had thwacked a sleepless new prime minister with "the heavy mallet of reality"."I don't think there are many incoming prime ministers who'd faced such challenging circumstances," he said, referring to both the country's economic situation and wars around the King's Speech on 17 July unveiled a substantial programme, making good on manifesto promises: rail nationalisation, planning reform, clean energy investment. But those hoping for a rabbit out of the hat, a defining surprise, were disappointed. In so many crucial areas — social care, child poverty, industrial strategy — the government's instinct was to launch reviews and consultations, rather than to declare a decisive cabinet secretary, Case could see what was happening — or not happening — across the whole of government. "There were some elements where not enough thinking had been done," he said. "There were areas where, sitting in the centre of government, early in a new regime, the prime minister and his team, including me as his sort of core team, knew what we wanted to do, but we weren't communicating that effectively across all of government."Not just communication within government: for us journalists there were days in that early period where it was utterly unclear what this new government wanted its story to made those early announcements, which did come, stand out even more: none more so than Chancellor Rachel Reeves's announcement on 29 July that she would means-test the winter fuel came in a speech primarily about the government's parlous economic inheritance. That is not what it is remembered for. Some in government admit that they expected a positive response to Reeves's radical frankness about what the government could and could not afford to do. Yet it sat in isolation - a symbol of this new government's economic priorities, with the Budget still three months Haigh, then the transport secretary, remembered: "It came so early and it hung on its own as such a defining policy for so long that in so many voters' minds now, that is the first thing they think about when they think about this Labour government and what it wants to do and the kinds of decisions it wants to make."The policy lasted precisely one winter. Sir Keir and his chancellor have argued in recent weeks that they were able to change course because of a stabilising was more direct about the U-turn. "If I'm being honest, I think the reaction to it since the decision was announced was probably stronger than we thought," he admits. 'Two-tier Keir' and his first UK crisis At the same time the chancellor stood up to announce the winter fuel cuts, news was unfolding of a horrific attack in about who had carried out the attack fuelled the first mass riots in this country since 2011, when Sir Keir had been the director of public prosecutions. Given the nature of the crisis, the prime minister was well placed to respond."As a first crisis, it was dealing with a bit of the machinery of government that he instinctively understood - policing, courts, prisons," Case says. Sir Keir's response was practical and pragmatic — making the judicial system flow faster meant that by mid-August at least 200 rioters had already been sentenced, most jailed with an average term of two in a way that was not quite clear at the time, the riots spawned what has become one of the defining attacks on the prime minister from the right: that of 'two-tier Keir'. The idea that some rioters were treated more harshly than other kinds of protesters had been morphed over time into a broader accusation about who and what the prime minister stood Keir had cancelled his family holiday to deal with the riots. Exhausted, he ended the summer dealing with questions about his personal integrity in what became known as 'freebiegate'. Most of the gifts for which he was being criticised - clothing, glasses, concert tickets - had been accepted before the election but Sir Keir was prime minister now. Case told me there was a "naivety" about the greater scrutiny that came with leading the more than that, there was a naivety in No 10 about how Sir Keir was seen. Here was a man elected in large part because of a crisis of trust in politics. He had presented himself as voters that he had followed the rules was to miss the point — they thought the rules themselves were bust. The political price of 'dispensing with' Gray By the winter of 2024, the sense of a government failing to get a grip of itself or a handle on the public mood, had grown. A chorus of off-the-record criticism, much of it strikingly personal, threatened to overwhelm the were personal ambitions and tensions at play, but more and more insiders - some of them fans of Gray initially - were telling me that the way in which Sir Keir's chief of staff was running government was structurally flawed, with the system simply not working announced in early October that she had resigned because she risked becoming a "distraction". In reality, Sir Keir had sacked her after some of his closest aides warned him he risked a mutiny if he did Gray was approached both for an interview and for her response to her critics but declined. To the end she retained some supporters in the cabinet including Louise Haigh. "I felt desperately sorry for her," she says."It was just a really, really cruel way to treat someone who'd already been so traduced by the Tories - and then [was] traduced by our side as well."Sir Keir appointed Gray. He empowered Gray. And he dispensed with Gray. This was the prime minister correcting his own mistakes - an episode which came at a high political price. A bridge on the world stage Yet on the world stage the prime minister continued to thrive, winning praise across political divides in the UK and Sullivan, Biden's adviser, was impressed by Sir Keir's handling of US President Donald Trump, describing the Oval Office meeting where the prime minister brandished an invitation from the King as "the best I've seen in terms of a leader in these early weeks going to sit down with the current president".It's an irony that it is Sir Keir, who made his reputation trying to thwart Brexit, who has found for the UK its most defined diplomatic role of the post-Brexit era — close to the US, closer than before to Europe, at the fore of the pro-Ukraine alliance, striking trade deals with India and others. And it has provided him with something more elusive too: a story — a narrative of a confident, pragmatic leader stepping up on the world stage, acting as a bridge between other countries in fraught risk, brought into sharp relief during the Israel-Iran conflict in recent days, is that Trump is too unpredictable for such a role to be a stable international arena has sharpened Sir Keir's choices domestically as well. Even while making welfare cuts that have displeased so many in his party, the prime minister has a clearer and more joined-up argument about prioritising security in all its forms: through work, through economic prudence, through defence of the yet, for plenty of voters Sir Keir has found definition to his government's direction too late. Labour's poor performance last month in the local elections plus defeat at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were a blow to Sir Keir and his team. It's far from unheard of for a governing party to lose a by-election, but to lose it to Reform UK on the same night that Nigel Farage's party hoovered up councils across England made this a distinctively new political days afterwards, Paul Ovenden, Sir Keir's strategy director, circulated a memo to Downing Street aides, which I've called for a "relentless focus on the new centre ground in British politics".The crucial swing voters, Ovenden wrote, "are the middle-age, working class, economically squeezed voters that we persuaded in the 2024 election campaign. Many of them voted for us in 2024 thinking we would fix the cost of living, fix the NHS, and reduce migration… we need to become more ruthless in pursuing those outcomes".For more than 100 of Starmer's own MPs, including many of those elected for the first time in that landslide a year ago, the main priority was ruthlessly dismantling the government's welfare reforms - plunging the prime minister as he approaches his first anniversary into his gravest political crisis yet. The stakes were beyond high. For the prime minister to have faced defeat on this so soon after the winter fuel reversal raises questions about his ability to get his way on plenty else if this first year has done anything, it has clarified the is not just a prime minister and a Labour Party hoping to win a second term. They are trying to prove to a tetchy and volatile country that not only do they get their frustration with politics, but that they can fix it too. None of that will be possible when profound policy disagreements are on public Stormy Year: A year on from the landslide election win, the BBC's Henry Zeffman talks to insiders about the challenges Labour has faced in government (BBC Radio 4, from 30 June 2025)Top picture credit: PA and Getty Images BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.
Daily Mail
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'God Save the King!': Victoria Starmer looks effortlessly chic in white summer dress as she joins PM Keir Starmer for Trooping the Colour
Victoria Starmer looked elegant in an all-white ensemble as she joined her husband Sir Keir at Trooping the Colour today. The prime minister's wife, 52, wore a midi length frock with a v-neck, short sleeves, and small buttons down the front. Lady Starmer paired her dress with a large fascinator, also in white, and coordinating heeled pumps. Her chestnut locks were worn loose, and she opted for a chic make-up look, with a fresh base, pink blush, and natural lip. She was photographed sitting next to her husband, 63, as they enjoyed the annual parade. And they were not the only attendees representing politics at the event: such is the importance of the parade that senior representatives from allied nations also attend. The PM posted today on X: 'Sending my best wishes to His Majesty The King today at Trooping the Colour. God Save The King.' Trooping the Colour is a centuries-old tradition that marks the Sovereign's official birthday. It dates back to the 17th century and is rooted in battlefield custom, when regimental flags, or 'colours,' were trooped in front of soldiers to ensure they could be recognised amid the smoke of combat. Last week a full-dress rehearsal, known as The Colonel's Review, took place serving as the final run-through before the King's official celebration. This year, the honour of trooping the Colour falls to the Coldstream Guards, who will officially present their regimental flag, known as the Colour, to King Charles. Following the Trooping ceremony, all eyes will be on the royal balcony to see who King Charles invites to wave to the crowds. King Charles and Queen Camilla will be front and centre on the balcony to watch the Red Arrows flypast, but it expected a host of senior royals will be alongside them. Prince William, 42, is expected to be joined by the Princess of Wales, 43 and their children, Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, 10, and Prince Louis, seven. Princess Anne will feature with her husband, Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, 70. Prince Edward, 61, - who like Anne will be fresh from his part in the procession - is expected on the balcony with his wife Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, 60 They are likely to be joined by their daughter Lady Louise, 21. Their son James, the Earl of Wessex, 17, did not make an appearance last year and may not attend the ceremony this time around either. The Duke of Kent, 89, will likely also be among the royals on the balcony, with the Duke of Gloucester, 80, and his 78-year-old wife Birgitte, the Duchess. As expected, Prince Harry, 40, and his wife Meghan Markle, 43, are not attending this year's celebrations. Having chosen to walk away from being working royals, they have not been present at Trooping the Colour since 2019. The other notable absentee will be Prince Andrew, 65, who remains exiled from public royal events amid the fallout from his relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein and the claims made by late accuser Virginia Giuffre. Andrew's daughters Princess Beatrice, 36, and Princess Eugenie, 35, are not expected to be there either amid Charles' desire for a slimmed-down monarchy and to keep the focus on working royals. Members of the royal family are expected to watch the flypast - including the RAF Red Arrows and a range of planes and helicopters - from the balcony. In previous years it has been a moment where the royal children shine - with little Prince Louis delighting fans last year as pretended to fly one of the planes, appearing to screw up his face as he mimicked the engine's deafening noise. The route for the flypast has not been officially confirmed, but the Military Air Shows has revealed an air restrictions map which shows the expected official route. Proposed restrictions are in the vicinity of the North Sea, East Anglia, Essex and London. Its expected the flypast will go over Buckingham Palace at 1pm. Held traditionally on the second Saturday in June, regardless of the Sovereign's actual date of birth, the celebrations have marked the monarch's official birthday since the mid-1700s. Queen Elizabeth attended all but two of her Trooping the Colours, missing it in 1955 when a national rail strike resulted in the event being cancelled and in 2020 due to lockdown restrictions. The parade is open to members of the public through an online ballot with ticketing ranging from £10 to £30 and is broadcast live on the BBC. What is Trooping the Colour? The Trooping of the Colour has marked the official birthday of the British Sovereign for more than 260 years. Over 1400 parading soldiers, 200 horses and 400 musicians come together each June in a great display of military precision, horsemanship and fanfare to mark the Sovereign's official birthday. The streets are lined with crowds waving flags as the parade moves from Buckingham Palace and down The Mall to Horse Guard's Parade, alongside Members of the Royal Family on horseback and in carriages. The display closes with an RAF fly-past, watched by Members of the Royal Family from Buckingham Palace balcony. Once the Sovereign has arrived at Horse Guard's Parade in Whitehall, they are greeted by a Royal salute and carry out an inspection of the troops, who are fully trained and operational soldiers wearing the ceremonial uniform of red tunics and bearskin hats. After the military bands have performed, the escorted Regimental Colour, or flag, is processed down the ranks of soldiers. Over one hundred words of command are used by the Officer in Command of the Parade to direct the several hundred soldiers. Once the Foot Guards have marched past the Sovereign, they ride back to Buckingham Palace at the head of the soldiers, before taking the salute again at the Palace from a dais. The Sovereign is then joined by other Members of the Royal Family on the balcony at Buckingham Palace to watch a fly-past by the Royal Air Force. A 41-gun salute is also fired in Green Park to mark the occasion.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
I know how Victoria Starmer feels. My family home became a target when my husband was an MP
At first, I thought it was a book. I was standing in the hallway of our Cornwall house in 2020 and opened the slim Royal Mail package, assuming it was a copy of Johnny 's memoir. When I realised I was holding a nappy in my hand, it took me a moment to process what was going on. Then the side of it flapped open and I saw it was filled with adult human excrement. 'It's s---,' I screamed to Johnny, who had his back to me. It took him a beat to understand that I was being literal. Quickly, he grabbed it, ran outside and dumped it on the lawn, and then called the police. Johnny was at this point a minister in Boris Johnson's government and while all mail going to his Westminster and Plymouth offices was scanned, we were left to our own devices at home. The police were with us half an hour later and were really helpful – eventually tracing it back to a woman in Croydon and doing everything they could to keep us safe. But I was shaken afterwards: this was our house, the place where we were raising our children away from prying eyes, and my husband's very public job had intruded inside it. Hence my sympathy for Victoria Starmer. We don't know each other but I can guess how she must be feeling after the horrific arson incident at their north London house. Knowing these people can invade a place you see as a sanctuary – somewhere you deliberately keep separate from the business of politics – makes you feel powerless and very unsafe. For me, it was as if someone had reached their arm into my kitchen and handed me the nappy themselves. Mrs Starmer is a clever woman and she will have understood that a job like her husband's doesn't come without consequences, but when Johnny first told me he wanted to be an MP, I was very naive. I didn't realise that abuse would be part of the territory. Johnny and I met aged seven at our primary school in Sussex. We both sang in the choir, but after moving to different secondary schools we didn't see each other again until we were invited to the same party in London in 2009. I was 29 and recognised Johnny – who was in the Army and had already completed two tours of Afghanistan – immediately. We were engaged quickly but because we decided to start a family soon afterwards, we ended up not getting married for another five years. However, our small wedding was arguably not the most life-changing moment of 2014. That is reserved for when Johnny told me he wanted to stand as an MP. He came home having read a statistic that said more soldiers died from suicide than on the field – and he found this so shocking he decided he wanted to do something about it. Johnny and I have always been a team and even though Plymouth, the seat he wanted to contest in the 2015 election, was heavily Labour at that point, we decided to give it a go. I had given up my career in the airline industry to have my children and was earning money doing a cleaning job, so I was happy to help him in any way I could. Together, we drove around the city in a van emblazoned with Johnny's face and knocked on about 28,000 doors; our middle daughter, who was a baby then, was usually strapped to one of our backs. We were given a 1 per cent chance of winning, so on the night of the election we went for a curry to celebrate having given it our best shot. Then we got a call from the constituency office: the count was close and we were needed there immediately. When he won by 1,000 votes, I felt such a sense of achievement. Plymouth Labour could not believe it – and nor, to be honest, could we. Johnny was handed an envelope saying: 'Well done, you're an MP', and the whips still had no idea who he was. Our life changed quickly. Unlike the party, the press were interested in us from the get-go. Johnny shared an office with four other new MPs but they had to kick him out because he had so many interviews and it was disturbing them. I think it was to do with him being a soldier and, maybe, our young family. Soon we were an open story for everyone. I agreed to interviews if it meant Plymouth would get recognised and not just be the place people mistook for Portsmouth. I figured that if it meant talking about what shower gel we use, so be it. As for our children: unlike Vic Starmer, I didn't mind occasional pictures of them in the paper, but I didn't want their lives to be too disturbed. We lived on the other side of the Tamar Bridge to Plymouth and we made sure they went to a school that wasn't in the constituency. My life, meanwhile, was completely intertwined with Johnny's job. I ran his office; it was all casework, diary stuff and admin. While I was there, they made a rule that no family members could work for MPs, but because I was in situ I was allowed to stay. I worked so hard: I deserved my salary, no matter what people online said. As for the rest of it, I just adapted. We were often invited to events in Plymouth and in London – and quite a few where I was asked to speak too. I really enjoyed it. Mostly, people were supportive of how much Johnny and I worked together, but every now and then someone from the 'old guard' would make a comment: usually something about me wearing trousers rather than a skirt. I just ignored it. I opened a Twitter (now X) account so I could say the things Johnny wasn't able to – I'm outspoken, but he never asked me to tone it down (and apparently the bigwigs at Conservative HQ loved reading it). I once called Liz Truss an imbecile and that caused a bit of a hoo-ha, but let's be honest – history has proved me right. I came off Twitter the day someone threatened the children: this person said that if I took them out that weekend, they wouldn't be safe. I told the police and they acted immediately, but that was it for me. I would be happy killing Twitter trolls forever but not if it puts the girls at risk. I don't miss that aspect of political life at all. When we joined in 2015, Parliament had a security detail for the higher echelons but much less support for everyone else. Over Brexit, when tensions were running incredibly high and Jo Cox was murdered, there was a general feeling of unease and, thankfully, security was ramped up. From then on, I went everywhere with a panic button in my pocket, and when I did Johnny's surgery on a Thursday I had a bodyguard with me. As Johnny's job got busier – and particularly once he became a minister in 2019 – I had to pick up more and more of the domestic work. He was usually away Monday to Thursday, which is a long time when you have three small children. It was hard for him too: he was desperate not to miss too much of the girls' childhoods, but he had no choice. Luckily, we have very easy-going daughters – and our third child, Audrey, was born in lockdown, so Johnny was home a lot during her first year. Still, being an MP is all-consuming. It's a massive honour and privilege to be chosen by your peers; what we didn't realise was how awful it would be navigating the system and trying to get policies through. British politics, essentially, doesn't work. To pitch one side against the other means the whole thing is built on hatred, division and bullying. And even if one side comes up with a good idea, the other has to criticise it, which means you are set up to fail. Still, for 10 years, it was our normal life. The 2024 election was brutal: Plymouth Labour are a special breed and when it was announced that we had lost, the security detail walked us to the stage, we shook the hand of the winner, and were back in the car five minutes later. Afterwards, there was an adjustment period and I felt sad for Johnny, who had put his heart and soul into it – but there was also a feeling of peace. It's wonderful having him home. Last December, he went to every Christmas concert and nativity play that the children were in for the first time in nearly a decade. I also finally had the space to think about what I wanted to do. I started The Dress Barn – a space to buy clothes for events and weddings in Cornwall, where we live. I love doing it. As for politics: if Johnny ever went back, he wouldn't be messing about – he would go with a big role in mind and, of course, I'd support him. But for now, we're happy being out of the spotlight.
