Sir Keir Starmer is the prime minister of Britain. He was born in London and represents a constituency in north London. He made his name as a human-rights lawyer before entering politics—he wrote a 900-page textbook on the European Convention on Human Rights. He has long argued that British politics is broken, though fixing the electoral system is not on his agenda.
Sir Keir entered Parliament in 2015 after a successful career as a barrister. He took up politics relatively late, in the way other middle-aged men take up gardening. "I'm not fulfilling some lifelong dream here," he told his biographer, Tom Baldwin. "I could happily work in the bookshop or something." Chris Ward, a former aide to Sir Keir and now an MP, has said his boss regards his role "solely as a means to an end of achieving change" and would "get out of the way" if he became an obstacle to it.
In 2021 Sir Keir endured a humiliating defeat to Boris Johnson's Conservative Party at a by-election in Hartlepool. While Mr Johnson posed in front of a giant blimp in his image at the town's marina, Sir Keir pondered quitting. It took his aides to talk him into staying.
Sir Keir is considered the most overtly pro-European prime minister since Sir Tony Blair. He has maintained red lines of no single market, no customs union and no free movement of people. At the first post-Brexit EU-UK summit on May 19th 2025 at Lancaster House, he agreed a "reset" with the EU including a defence-and-security pact giving Britain access to the EU's €150bn defence fund, alignment with most EU food standards, an extension of the fisheries agreement to 2038, and a youth-mobility deal. He estimated the reset would boost GDP by £9bn (0.3%) by 2040. The deal is not a single event but the start of a process of continuous negotiation, overseen by annual summits. Even after the reset, this remains what was once termed a hard Brexit—harder than the deal Theresa May tried to get through Parliament in 2019.
On May 6th 2025 Sir Keir hailed a trade deal with India as Britain's "biggest trade deal" since Brexit. The deal halved Indian tariffs on whisky and gin and cut car tariffs from 100% to 10%. He also hopes to strike a deal with the United States but is wary of American demands for greater farm-produce access, which could undermine a veterinary agreement with the EU. Critics argue he risks missing the strategic shift pushing Britain's longer-term interests closer to Europe, focusing too much on tactical handling of Donald Trump.
On May 12th 2025 Sir Keir unveiled a new immigration policy, declaring that Britain had conducted "a one-nation experiment in open borders" causing "incalculable" damage. The policy ends work visas for care workers, raises the settlement wait from five to ten years, shortens graduate work visas from two years to 18 months, and requires spousal-visa applicants to speak basic English. Companies hiring foreigners must convince a new Labour Market Evidence Group that they cannot train natives. Sir Keir denied that the policy was driven by Reform UK's polling lead, though the party topped many surveys.
Sir Keir has pursued a "reset" with the SNP-run Scottish government, offering no grand constitutional thinking but promising to make the devolution settlement of 1998 run better. The strategy has pushed independence off the agenda, though voters remain split on separation. The rivalry between Labour and the SNP is intense: both claim the mantle of the natural party of industrial Scotland. Labour won 37 of 57 Scottish seats in the 2024 general election, and aims to oust the SNP from the Holyrood government it has run since 2007 in the May 2026 elections. The reset has been criticised by the SNP as cosmetic, since Scotland has no greater say over areas reserved to Westminster, such as budgets and immigration.
Sir Keir was initially judged to have handled the Southport riots of July 2024 fairly well. A year on, however, he adopted a defensive posture, conceding that immigration risks turning Britain into an "island of strangers" and sympathising with people angry about illegal immigration.
In 2024 Sir Keir formulated six goals to achieve by 2029: raise incomes across Britain; add 13,000 neighbourhood police; ensure 75% of five-year-olds are "ready to learn"; build 1.5m homes; cut hospital waiting lists; and—by 2030—generate 95% of electricity with clean power.
Sir Keir entered office with a serene confidence that, if only he treated the civil service with respect, it would carry out his party's manifesto. He quickly became frustrated. "Every time I go to pull a lever," he told a select committee, "there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm's-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be." He has complained that government agencies have become a "cottage industry of checkers and blockers". Paul Ovenden, his former director of strategy, coined the term "stakeholder state" to describe the sticky nexus of campaigners, regulators and lawyers who gum up government business. Sir Keir wants to "get rid of as much of the regulation as possible, get rid of arm's-length bodies". He appointed Darren Jones to the new post of "chief secretary to the prime minister", tasked with enforcing his priorities in Whitehall.
The IMF and the Bank of England expect Britain's annual growth rate to remain around 1.5% over the next three years—the same sluggish pace it has managed since 2008. The government's target is to build 1.5m new homes in five years; in year one it managed 187,000. Building has slowed in cities, where it is needed most. In London it has almost ground to a halt: in the second quarter of 2025 two-thirds of London boroughs started no projects of 20 or more homes. Business investment fell by 4% in the three months to June 2025. The Oxford-Cambridge Arc, a scheme to turn the university cities into "Europe's Silicon Valley", has been criticised as "lacking in direction and momentum" by Andy Williams, a former AstraZeneca executive who chairs a board of local business leaders. On September 21st 2025 the government approved a second runway at Gatwick, a simpler upgrade that could be completed by 2029.
Sir Keir's government initially championed sweeping planning reform, vowing to end NIMBYism. In July 2025, after complaints from environmental charities—the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds alone has 1.2m members—the government put forward a slew of amendments to its flagship planning legislation, tightening environmental-compensation standards. Labour's YIMBYs argued the concessions would make it easier for campaigners to tangle projects in legal challenges. The Office for Budget Responsibility has priced the original reforms into its growth forecasts, estimating they would make the economy about 0.2% bigger in 2029.
Labour is not a party in Sir Keir's image. There are still Blairites and Brownites, some Corbynites and even a few Milibandites. There are no Starmerites. Those who owe their role in Parliament to his 2024 victory are remarkably ungrateful, often regarding their boss with contempt. Labour won by a mile, but largely by default.
In the election in 2024 Labour won 63% of the seats on 34% of the vote, the most disproportionate result in British political history. Sir Keir won a parliamentary majority of 165 seats. There are well over 100 jobs in government but some 400 Labour MPs competing for them, which has weakened backbench discipline. In 2025 a rebellion over a welfare bill that aimed to cut £5bn from disability benefits saw 120 Labour MPs sign a wrecking amendment, tabled by Dame Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury Committee. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, sided with the rebels. It took Sir Tony Blair, the last prime minister with a comparably large majority, eight years to lose a Commons vote. On July 1st 2025 Labour MPs gutted the sickness-and-disability benefits bill in a huge rebellion. The next day his chancellor wept in Parliament and yields on Britain's debt soared. The welfare reforms had aimed to trim just £5.5bn of annual savings from an expected total welfare bill of £66bn by 2030.
On election morning in 2024 Sir Keir called trust in government "the battle that defines our age"; a year later, trust was at a 40-year low under Labour. Only 12% of voters expected Labour to put country before party. Labour trailed Reform UK in polls at its first-year mark.
On July 17th 2025 Sir Keir and Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, signed a wide-ranging Anglo-German "friendship" treaty—Germany's first major bilateral agreement since its Elysée Treaty with France in 1963. Sir Keir framed it as part of his broader "reset" with the EU; officials believe the pact will cement a "strategic triangle" between Britain, France and Germany. The treaty covers defence, the economy and migration. It includes joint development of a new long-range strike missile, a mutual-assistance clause committing one side to assist the other in the event of an attack, and a German promise to clamp down on the trade in small boats used to smuggle migrants across the Channel. In return, Britain agreed to make it easier for German schoolchildren to visit by allowing teachers to bring pupils without visas.
On June 2nd 2025 Sir Keir launched Britain's strategic defence review in Scotland. It committed to buying "up to" a dozen SSN-AUKUS attack submarines and considering F-35A jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Sir Keir has insisted that rising defence spending will be a "defence dividend", bringing jobs and investment that "will be felt in the pockets of working people".
On January 6th 2026 Sir Keir promised to send troops to Ukraine as part of a "coalition of the willing" to uphold a future ceasefire—the most serious commitment of British forces since the occupation of Afghanistan. He has signed a declaration of intent to deploy British troops to Ukraine as part of security guarantees for a future peace deal. He has made Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage's "Putin-positive" stance a central line of attack, claiming that under Mr Farage's leadership Britain's role in the European coalition in support of Ukraine would collapse.
In January 2026 Sir Keir criticised Donald Trump's tariff threats over the Greenland dispute as "completely wrong"—a rare public rebuke of the American president. Mr Trump responded on Truth Social by attacking Britain's decision to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, calling it "an act of GREAT STUPIDITY".
No British prime minister has visited China for eight years. In late January 2026 Sir Keir was due to visit, with ambitions kept low: flying the flag for British business—Scottish whisky, salmon—and normalising engagement with the world's second-largest economy. Quietly, he may seek deeper co-operation on life sciences and green tech, though Chinese investments have been limited by American lobbying and domestic debates about whether Chinese wind turbines or other technologies imperil national security. Opposition politicians on January 20th 2026 accused the government of "surrender" for approving a long-delayed project for China to build a large embassy near the Tower of London.
By late 2025 Sir Keir, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz had formed a tight trilateral leadership known as the E3. When Volodymyr Zelensky scrambled to push back on America's 28-point peace plan, his first European call was with the three leaders. Sir Keir co-leads the "coalition of the willing" planning a reassurance force for Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire. For Britain, direct links with France and Germany are "a way of compensating for Brexit", according to Anand Menon of UK in a Changing Europe, a think-tank. The Anglo-German treaty identifies closer trilateral co-operation as one of its explicit ambitions.
Labour won its landslide in July 2024 with 34% of the vote. A year on, support had fallen to 24%, five points behind Reform UK. Sir Keir's diagnosis in opposition was unflashy: "a sense that nothing works, that we're going backwards, a country in decline." He articulated "foundations" and "missions", later refined into a "Plan for Change" with "milestones".
GDP growth since the election has totalled 0.8%, ranking Britain about third in the G7. The aim is the "highest sustained growth in the G7". Net additions to England's housing stock amounted to just 201,000 in the year to March 2025, the lowest in nine years—far below the 1.5m target over five years. Some 6.2m people—one in ten of the population—are waiting to see an NHS specialist, with only 60% seen within the 18-week target. Small-boat crossings reached 43,000 over the year, a 38% increase. Net migration fell to 431,000 in 2024, and Brian Bell of the Migration Advisory Committee expects it to halve again before stabilising at around 300,000.
Sir Keir pledged to spend 2.6% of GDP on defence by 2027 and aim for 3.5% by 2035 (5% including "resilience and security"). Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, lifted a moratorium on onshore wind turbines and set a target for 95% of electricity to come from low-carbon sources by 2030; the current figure is 58%.
Downing Street has been in disarray since Sir Keir entered office, with a constant stream of sackings, surprisingly short tenures and ill-tempered briefings about senior advisers and, increasingly, cabinet ministers. On November 12th 2025 officials in Downing Street accused Wes Streeting, the health secretary, of planning to oust the prime minister. Mr Streeting labelled his accusers conspiracy theorists who were trying to "kneecap" him. Cabinet ministers regard Sir Keir with increasingly ill-disguised contempt. It is not just Mr Streeting who thinks he could do a better job.
Sir Keir's government introduced an Employment Rights Act, which cleared Parliament on December 18th 2025 and will mostly enter into force later in 2026. The act shifts Britain's trade-union laws to roughly where they stood in the late 1970s, before Margaret Thatcher's anti-union reforms, making it easier for unions to recruit, bargain and call strikes. Employers face unfair-dismissal rules from day one rather than after two years. Unions can formally request access to workplaces to recruit members and contact workers digitally. The recognition threshold may fall from 10% to as little as 2% of the workforce. Strike ballots can be held by email rather than post, and the requirement for 50% turnout is scrapped. Overall, the act shifts Britain from among the most employer-friendly labour laws in the OECD to the middle of the pack, according to an analysis by legal academics at the University of Cambridge. The government describes the effect as a "transfer of power from employers to workers".
On January 30th 2026 a tranche of emails revealed an intimate relationship between Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein, plunging the government into what has been called Britain's worst political scandal of this century. Downing Street knew that Lord Mandelson's close relationship with Epstein persisted long after the latter's conviction, but Sir Keir ploughed on with the Washington appointment at the urging of Morgan McSweeney, his most influential adviser. The affair exposed Sir Keir's reliance on New Labour veterans for ballast. In "Get In", an account of Sir Keir's rise to power, his own advisers regard him with thinly disguised contempt; one compared him to a toddler sitting at the front of the DLR, a driverless train in east London, with a pretend control panel. Sir Keir remains in office at the mercy of backbenchers who regard him with contempt. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is among the likely challengers but was closer to the disgraced peer than the prime minister ever was.
Sir Keir's government has been criticised for inflicting political pain with little fiscal gain. His chancellor, Rachel Reeves, scrapped the winter-fuel allowance then reversed course, maintained the two-child benefit cap before abolishing it in November 2025, and paused infrastructure projects for almost a year before giving them the green light. Sir Keir told Labour Party members in 2024: "Country first, party second. That isn't a slogan. It's the foundation of this project." Yet the November 2025 budget, with £26bn in tax increases and £11bn in extra spending, was widely judged to have put party before country. Across two budgets his government raised taxes by almost £70bn (2% of GDP) and pledged about £80bn of extra spending. Labour's polling fell to around 18%—losing support on the left to parties such as the Greens faster than it was losing voters to the right.
On July 29th 2025 Sir Keir announced Britain would recognise the state of Palestine at the UN General Assembly in September, unless Israel acted to end Gaza's humanitarian crisis, implement a ceasefire, repudiate settlement-building in the West Bank and commit to a two-state solution. The announcement was a shift from Labour's manifesto position (page 124), which pledged recognition as part of a peace process. More than a third of MPs, half of them Labour, had signed a letter demanding recognition; a third of the cabinet agreed, some publicly. France's Emmanuel Macron had made a similar declaration days before.
Policy shifts on Israel under Sir Keir's government have included restoring funding to UNRWA, stopping many arms exports to Israel, ending trade talks with Israel, indicating it would uphold an International Court of Justice arrest warrant for Binyamin Netanyahu and imposing sanctions on Israel's most extreme ministers. The British-made arms exports that really matter are spare parts for F-35 jets, which could only be stopped by pulling out of a global components pool—which ministers will not do.
In the 21 seats where more than 30% of the population is Muslim, Labour's vote share dropped by 29 points to 36% at the 2024 general election. Five pro-Gaza independents were elected, including Jeremy Corbyn. One in three Muslims say they would vote for the new left-wing party Corbyn has launched with Zarah Sultana, according to Stack Data Strategy.
Sir Keir believes the centre of government is too weak and sclerotic. On September 1st 2025 he appointed a new "chief secretary to the prime minister" to enforce his writ.
On September 5th 2025 Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, resigned after revelations that she had underpaid £40,000 in stamp duty on a second home. Sir Keir reshuffled half the cabinet. David Lammy, the former foreign secretary, became deputy prime minister and justice secretary. Yvette Cooper became foreign secretary. Shabana Mahmood, a migration hawk, became home secretary. Peter Kyle became business secretary. Pat McFadden took charge of welfare reform. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary and arguably the closest thing Sir Keir has to a friend at the top of politics, was asked to move jobs. He refused. The reshuffle revealed Sir Keir's balancing act: courting Reform UK defectors by promising to halt illegal migration while hoping left-wing voters would return through improving living standards and dislike of Nigel Farage.
At Labour's annual conference in Liverpool on September 30th 2025, Sir Keir declared that Britain was locked in a "fight for the soul of the country" against Nigel Farage and Reform UK. He called Reform's immigration policy "racist"—a potent word in British politics that he then doubled down on in his conference speech. The approach was dubbed the "Macron strategy" by Labour-watchers: in 2017 and 2022 Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen to the French presidency by drawing in the votes of those on the left and centre-right who found her intolerable. Sir Keir is attempting something similar through force of argument rather than a two-round voting system.
The strategy marked a head-spinning reversal. A month earlier Sir Keir would have referred to Mr Farage's plans merely as "unworkable". He had won in 2024 by targeting Brexit-leaning working-class swing voters in joyless, austere terms. But since the election Labour had bled more support to the Liberal Democrats and Greens on the left than to Reform. Sir Keir also abandoned "hippy-punching"—his leadership's habit of attacking its own progressive base—and embraced causes it had once disdained: recognising Palestine, scrapping the two-child benefit cap, and denouncing Brexit. Seven MPs who had been expelled for backing an amendment on the cap were readmitted.
Sir Keir has the lowest satisfaction ratings of any leader since 1977, according to Ipsos. Modelling by More in Common suggests that current polling would cut Labour from 411 seats to just 90, with Reform surging to a governing majority of 373 seats. When voters are told the contest is close between Labour and Reform locally, however, left-wing voters swing behind Sir Keir—raising his notional tally to 196.
New research from the British Election Study, published in September 2025, found that the Brexit referendum of 2016 hardened cleavages in the electorate along demographic lines, producing two ideologically distinct "party blocs". In the liberal bloc sit Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the nationalist parties; in the conservative bloc, the Conservatives and Reform UK. Critically, voter volatility arises more from voters shifting within blocs than between them: more than 25% moved to another party within the same bloc between 2019 and 2024, compared with just 12% who shifted between blocs. Labour's 2024 victory was built on tactical voting within the left bloc; no such co-ordination existed on the right. At the 2024 general election, Labour and the Tories won a combined 57% of the vote—their lowest combined share since 1910.
Only 18% of voters with a household income under £30,000 would vote Labour, down from 33% at the 2024 election. For the first time ever, the ratio of Labour's vote share among the richest voters (earning over £70,000) to the poorest (earning under £30,000) is larger than any other major party.
Sir Keir warns that the emergence of the populist right is "the political fight of our times". He says he could "sleep at night" under a Conservative government, but a populist-right government led by Mr Farage "would be a different proposition". His answer is to prove that national renewal, patriotism and progressive policies can meet Britain's challenges.
Sir Keir mentioned London only once in his party-conference speech in September 2025—to argue that the government should invest more elsewhere. Polls in early 2026 suggest London is the only British region which would vote to re-elect his government. The Economist's model suggests that in a typical scenario Labour might win 98 MPs across Britain, two-fifths of them in London. Labour won 43% of the vote in London in 2024, its lowest share in any general election since 2010.
Sir Keir's government has made "the cost of living" the touchstone of nearly every decision, from net-zero policy to defence. When NATO was alarmed over Donald Trump's designs on Greenland, Sir Keir's address skipped from Western security to rail fares and prescription prices. The government's net-zero home-insulation scheme will spend £15bn ($21bn) to bring down bills; in the parliamentary debate on the scheme, the cost of living was mentioned 13 times and emissions twice. Critics argue the approach treats voters as customers rather than citizens.
Sir Keir is nervous of losing pro-Brexit "red wall" voters to Nigel Farage's Reform UK, despite polling showing that 53% of respondents think closer EU relations would be positive against just 13% saying they would be negative. His Labour Party polls at a bit above 20%, roughly level with the Conservatives, Reform and the Liberal Democrats in a four-way split of British politics.
After local and devolved elections on May 7th 2026, in which Labour was trounced (losing 58% of its councillors in England, including Barnsley and Sunderland for the first time since 1974, and falling to third place in Wales with just nine of 96 Senedd seats), nearly 100 Labour MPs, including four government ministers, called publicly for Sir Keir to resign. Polling by Ipsos found that only 29% wanted him to stay. To trigger a leadership challenge, a candidate needs the nominations of one-fifth of the parliamentary party (81 MPs). The Socialist Campaign Group, representing the Corbynite left, has only 24 MPs—too few to field a candidate. If a contest is triggered, Labour's roughly 330,000 members would pick the next leader; polls suggest they most favour Andy Burnham, though he is not currently an MP. The membership skews male (57%), old (72% over 50), middle-class (72%) and well to the left of Labour voters. The party's joining fee is £74.
On February 9th 2026 Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour, became the most senior figure in the party to call for Sir Keir to resign. Cabinet ministers rallied around the prime minister, potential rivals blinked, and Sir Keir gave a fighting talk to his MPs. The crisis cost him two top advisers: Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, and Tim Allan, his communications director. On February 12th he ousted Sir Chris Wormald as cabinet secretary and replaced him with Antonia Romeo, a controversial figure who promises to inject "energetic, visible leadership" into Whitehall.
Sir Keir is the most unpopular British prime minister since records began, his ratings worse even than Liz Truss's during her 49-day stint in office. Reform UK has led every opinion poll since May 2025. Almost half of Labour's 2024 voters now say they would vote for another party. In 19 months Sir Keir has lost two chiefs of staff, four directors of communications and 11 ministers.
Prospective challengers need the support of one-fifth of Labour MPs (81) before the matter goes to a ballot of members. Angela Rayner is the punters' favourite; a campaign website for her briefly appeared online in January, though she dismissed it as a fake. Wes Streeting is suspected of preparing a bid—on February 9th he released a transcript of messages with Peter Mandelson to neutralise criticism of his proximity to the disgraced peer. Andy Burnham cannot stand because he is not an MP. Ed Miliband says his previous experience as Labour leader has "inoculated" him from wanting to stand again.
A fresh scandal has also emerged over Matthew Doyle, another of Sir Keir's former communications directors, and his links to a child-sex-offender Labour councillor. Local elections on May 7th 2026 could bring renewed peril.
The economy grew by 1.3% in 2025—the fastest since 2022 and the third-fastest in the G7.
Sir Keir promises to "hack back the thicket of red tape" and shut down the "checkers and blockers". His government is considering scrapping the Regulatory Policy Committee (RPC), a low-profile body that studies the impact assessments accompanying draft laws and judges whether they are sufficiently thorough, giving green or red ratings. The Employment Rights Act was among those marked red. Critics argue that if Sir Keir were serious about deregulation, he would consider the RPC a vital ally. A National Audit Office report found that government departments had failed to "articulate their risk appetite" to the regulators they sponsor.
"Hard power is the currency of the age," Sir Keir told the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. His government plans to downsize Britain's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office: spending is expected to fall by an average of 6.1% a year in real terms between now and 2028-29, the largest cut to any department, compared with a 1.5% increase across government. Between 15% and 25% of the foreign-office workforce could lose their jobs. Foreign aid has been hit hardest, cut from 0.5% of GNI to 0.3% by 2027, to fund higher defence spending.
An idea has taken root among Britain's political classes that the country is ungovernable. Chief among those who hold this view is Sir Keir himself. "My experience now as prime minister is of frustration," said Sir Keir, who commands a majority of 165 in the least constrained executive anywhere in the democratic world. He fired Sir Oliver Robbins, the head of the Foreign Office, for not informing him that Peter Mandelson had failed his security vetting—despite Downing Street having wanted Lord Mandelson in Washington. Sir Keir needed someone to blame and Sir Oliver fitted.
Douglas Alexander, the secretary of state for Scotland, was asked whether Sir Keir would last until the next election. "I expect so," he replied. Many, if not most, Labour MPs think Sir Keir is a goner.
The worst rift between Britain and America since the Suez crisis of 1956. Sir Keir got on with Donald Trump for a time: a White House meeting in February 2025, an invitation for a second state visit, a tariff deal in May 2025 and a NATO summit in June. Trump was irked by European resistance to his wooing of Russia and his renewed demand to annex Greenland. The war in Iran brought matters to a head. Trump denounced Europeans as "cowards"; Sir Keir told Parliament: "I'm not going to yield" to American pressure.
King Charles III's trip to America on April 27th-30th 2026—ostensibly to commemorate the 250th anniversary of American independence—turned into a mission to salvage the "special relationship", as Winston Churchill called it in 1946.
Sir Keir did not instinctively rally behind America when the war in Iran began. He refused to let American warplanes use the base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands as part of the bombing, worrying about its legality. Only after British interests came under attack did he allow British bases to be used for the "specific and limited defensive purpose" of helping destroy Iran's missiles at source. An Iranian-made drone subsequently hit the British air base of Akrotiri in Cyprus.
"We all remember the mistakes of Iraq," Sir Keir said on March 1st 2026. "And we have learned those lessons." He told Parliament that he "does not believe in regime change from the skies". Donald Trump told the Telegraph that he was "very disappointed" in the initial decision on Diego Garcia and that the prime minister had taken "far too long" to change his mind. Mr Trump shot back from the White House: this is "not Winston Churchill that we're dealing with", complaining that Britain had been "very, very unco-operative". The friction could complicate King Charles's visit to America in April 2026.
The episode exposed a deeper rift: Sir Keir's measured, lawyerly approach to foreign policy—focused on diplomacy, international law and maintaining the status quo—is almost the polar opposite of Mr Trump's, for whom disregarding the rule of law is a central part of his approach. Perhaps most sobering for Britain, as far as America is concerned, the country matters little in all this; it barely merits a mention in American commentary on the war.
It's amazing how much "mature wisdom" resembles being too tired.