Starmer’s next first-time challenge is a test of his worldview – but he’s quietly building a reliable team
Sir Keir Starmer faces another first-time challenge this week.
Still just months into the job, the prime minister will be delivering his first speech to the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City of London on Monday.
It will be a rare chance to see the Labour leader in white tie and tailcoat in the glistening historical setting of Guildhall, surrounded by the rich and powerful. Unless of course, Sir Keir follows his Labour predecessor Gordon Brown and tries to dress down.
Gordon Brown speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at Mansion House in London in 2007. Pic: Reuters
Sir Keir is bound to dwell on the economy, the poor inheritance he believes he has received from the Conservatives, and his determination to stay the course set in the recent budget.
By convention, however, the prime minister’s Guildhall speech focuses on foreign policy and Britain’s place in the world.
The grandees in the dining hall, and the waiting world beyond it, will be listening out for how Sir Keir’s thoughts are shaping up since his election victory and after the crash course in international diplomacy he has undertaken in very uncertain times.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in Samoa in October. Pic: PA
Foreign affairs matter for PMs – and the UK
The UK did “take back control” with the Brexit referendum vote. This country is now an independent entity outside the big power blocks of the United States, the European Union, China and Russia, and unaffiliated with the rest of the world in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
The UK must try to navigate a successful future for itself at a time when there is a widespread populist impulse to put national interests first ahead of any multinational obligations.
The new prime minister has been an easy target for all the time he has spent travelling abroad. The critics who suggest he should have stayed at home need to say which of the official engagements he should have cancelled.
Do they really think he should have abandoned the UK’s place at the top table for meetings of the United Nations, the G7 summit of Western democracies, the G20 gathering of the world’s biggest economies or COP29 on climate change?
Are they saying he wasted his time forging inaugural bilateral contacts with key allies including presidents like Macron, Biden, Trump, Zelenskyy, and Scholz.
Keir Starmer on the plane to the G20 summit. Pic: PA
Debutant prime ministers are often surprised by the amount of time they have to spend on foreign affairs. As they become more experienced, most of them realise it is one of the most important aspects of heading a government.
Diplomacy also has attractions for them personally. It is an area of policy where they deal with equals, other foreign leaders, and can take decisions – at the most extreme staying in and out of wars – without having to manoeuvre around colleagues and parliament at home.
Most cabinet ministers and MPs are rightly preoccupied with domestic issues such as health, education and welfare. This leaves a prime minister and their advisers plenty of leeway for exercising statecraft.
Envoys matter almost as much as the top job
The personal relationships prime ministers and their envoys develop with their foreign counterparts can have a significant impact on the national interest.
Non-elected officials or representatives, operating in so-called “back channels”, are likely to matter more and have more direct influence than in other policy areas.
Consuelo Thiers, a political psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, studies leadership approaches to international relations.
She believes: “Starmer’s personality is characterised by a high belief in his ability to control events, a strong need for power, and a complex approach to decision-making.”
So far he has moved deliberatively, gaining experience and avoiding black-and-white positions. He is also slowly assembling a team of advisers which seems to hark back to the New Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
The top appointment is Jonathan Powell as national security adviser. Powell was Tony Blair’s chief of staff throughout his decade in power. He was a risk-taking participant in the backchannels which resulted in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Before that, he was a career British diplomat, serving in Washington DC.
Former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and Labour adviser Jonathan Powell. Pic: PA
Starmer previously hired Powell on a one-off basis to negotiate a settlement over the future of the Chagos Islands. That agreement handed sovereignty over the islands to Mauritius but kept access for 99 years to the Diego Garcia military base for US forces.
But the deal is now in danger of unravelling because of elections in the US and Mauritius. Weeks before he officially starts being national security adviser, Powell is shuttling between capitals again trying to find a compromise.
Marco Rubio, the US president-elect’s nominee for secretary of state, has said the arrangement would “provide an opportunity for communist China to gain valuable intelligence on our naval support facility”.
Meanwhile, the new Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam also wants to review the deal.
The Islands will only be the first example of the big power rivalries between US and Chinese interests which Powell will have to grapple with on Starmer’s behalf.
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Reliable team could help repair EU relations
The UK’s other essential relationship is with Europe.
Starmer has reaffirmed that there will be no return to freedom of movement, the single market or a customs union with the EU.
But, unlike his Conservative predecessors, he has energetically pursued warmed relations with European and EU leaders.
Rishi Sunak at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in November 2023 – during happier times when he was prime minister. Pic: Reuters
Where the Conservatives set up a Department for Exiting the EU, Starmer has established an EU directorate in the Cabinet Office, separate from the Foreign Office, under the minister Nick Thomas-Symonds.
The government is now advertising for a senior official to reset relations with Brussels. Michael Ellam, who moved with Gordon Brown from the Treasury to Number 10, is expected to get the job, according to The Financial Times. Ellam is a veteran heavyweight civil servant with many connections in the EU having worked as chair of the EU financial services committee during the UK’s membership.
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Olly Robbins and Antonia Romeo, the two front runners to become the next cabinet secretary, also both have significant foreign policy experience, in Brussels and New York respectively, although Starmer may choose one of the two other domestic-focussed civil servants from the four-person shortlist.
His newly appointed director of policy in Downing Street is Liz Lloyd. She was Powell’s deputy in the Blair government and has since worked as an international investor and banker in Africa.
It’s less likely, but some have been advising the prime minister to take up Nigel Farage’s offer to be a linkman to the Donald Trump administration.
As he looks out across the candelabras of Guildhall on Monday, Sir Keir Starmer may only hint at his worldview in the reassuring knowledge that he is quietly putting together a reliable team who will watch his back and look out for the national interest in the unavoidable backchannels of diplomacy.
The biggest city in the Sahel has been ransacked and left in ruins.
War erupted in Sudan’s capital Khartoum in April 2023 and sent millions searching for safety.
The city was quickly captured by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after a power struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for total control.
At least 61,000 people were killed from the fighting and siege conditions in Khartoum state alone.
Thousands more were maimed and many remain missing.
The RSF fled Khartoum’s neighbourhoods in caravans carrying the city’s looted treasures as the army closed in and recaptured it after two years of occupation.
The empty streets they left behind are lined with charred, bullet-ridden buildings and robbed store fronts.
The once shiny skyscrapers built along the confluence of the River Nile are now husks of blackened steel.
The neighbourhoods are skeletal. Generational homes are deserted and hollow.
Damage from fighting around Khartoum
Trenches snake the streets where copper electric cables were ripped out of the ground and pulled out of lampposts now overridden with weeds.
The majority of the 13 million people displaced by this war fled Khartoum. Many left in a rush, assuming it would only take a few weeks for peace to be restored.
My parents were among those millions and in the midst of the abandoned, looted homes is the house where I grew up.
Yousra Elbagir’s family home was left in ruins by RSF troops
Yousra said it was likely a bomb had previously fallen nearby and shaken the house at its base
A shell of a home
I have to strain my eyes to see the turn to my house. All the usual markers are gone. There are no gatherings of young people drinking coffee with tea ladies in the leafy shade – just gaping billboard frames that once held up advertisements behind cars of courting couples parked by the Nile.
Our garden is both overgrown and dried to death.
The mango, lemon and jasmine trees carefully planted by my mother and brother have withered.
Structural damage to the outside of the home
The Bougainvillea has reached over the pathway and blocked off the main entrance. We go through the small black side door.
Our family car is no longer in the garage, forcing us to walk around it.
It was stolen shortly after my parents evacuated.
The two chairs my mum and dad would sit at the centre of the front lawn are still there, but surrounded by thorny weeds and twisted, bleached vines.
How the home looked before Sudan’s war
And how it looks now
The neighbour’s once lush garden is barren too.
Their tall palm trees at the front of the house have been beheaded – rounding off into a greyish stump instead of lush fronds.
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Everyone in Khartoum is coming back to a game of Russian roulette. Searching out their houses to confirm suspicions of whether it was blasted, burned or punctured with bullets.
Many homes were looted and bruised by nearby combat but some are still standing. Others have been completely destroyed.
How the home looked before the war
And how it looks now
The outside of our house looks smooth from the street but has a crack in the base of the front wall visible from up close.
It is likely a bomb fell nearby and shook the house at its base – a reminder of the airstrikes and shelling that my parents and their neighbours fled.
Inside, the damage is choking.
Most of the furniture has been taken except a few lone couches.
The carpets and curtains have been stripped. The electrical panels and wiring pulled out. The appliances, dishes, glasses and spices snatched from the kitchens.
Yousra shows her mother pictures found in the home
The walls are bare apart from the few items they decided to spare. Ceilings have been punctured and cushions torn open in their hunt for hidden gold.
The walls are marked with the names of RSF troops that came in and out of this house like it was their own.
The home that has been the centre of our life in Sudan is a shell.
Sudan’s war has left the country fractured
Glimmers of hope
The picture of sheer wreckage settles and signs of familiarity come into focus.
A family photo album that is 20 years old.
The rocking chair my mother cradled me and my sister in. My university certificate.
Yousra finds her university certificate in the wreckage
Celebratory snaps of my siblings’ weddings. Books my brother has had since the early nineties.
The painting above my bed that I have pined over during the two years – custom-made and gifted to me for my 24th birthday and signed by my family on the back.
There are signs of dirt and damage on all these items our looters discarded but it is enough.
Yousra’s parents pictured at home before they fled Khartoum
Evidence of material destruction but a reminder of what we can hope will endure.
The spirit of the people that gathered to laugh, cry and break bread in these rooms.
A portrait of Yousra’s grandmother damaged by RSF troops
The hospitality and warmth of a Sudanese home with an open door.
The community and sense of togetherness that can never truly be robbed.
What remains in our hearts and our city is a sign of what will get us through.
World
Unpredictable and disruptive or canny and persistent – what exactly is Donald Trump’s foreign policy?
So, after 100 days of Donald Trump the big question for me remains – does the US president have a coherent foreign policy or is he just winging it?
Let’s take his attitude to the war in Ukraine – here “inconsistent” is perhaps the best description.
Back in February, he and vice president JD Vance humiliated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by shouting at him in the Oval Office.
A few days later, I spoke to Mr Zelenskyy in person when he confided to me that maybe he would have to step down if NATO could guarantee Ukraine membership – a man who perhaps sensed he could never win against a hostile Mr Trump.
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Sky News meets Zelenskyy: The key moments
Yet, fast-forward to last weekend in Rome, and an iconic picture of the two men in close conversation at the Pope’s funeral.
This time round, it is Russian President Vladimir Putin on the receiving end of the presidential anger, blaming him for the fact that “too many people are dying!”
Trump and Zelenskyy talk in the Vatican. Pic: AP
To Trump’s supporters, this is the smart negotiator, constantly repositioning himself as new information comes in, prior to pulling off a spectacular deal.
To his many detractors, it indicates a dangerous incoherence that is replicated in other key areas, including tariffs as well as his relationship with his allies in Europe and his foes in Beijing.
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Flexible or fallible; in control or all at sea? In the fast and furious world of Donald Trump, it’s almost impossible to call.
The only constants are his unwavering self-belief, or as the man himself says: “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”
We shall see.
A paramedic in Gaza who was detained for more than five weeks following an Israeli attack that killed 15 aid workers has been released, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said.
Asaad al Nsasrah was one of 17 aid workers who were attacked in Tel al Sultan in southern Gaza by Israeli forces on 23 March.
Asaad was one of two first responders who survived – the other 15 were killed.
He was initially thought to be missing, as his body was not among the dead. It was not until 13 April, three weeks after the attack, that Israel confirmed Asaad was alive and in Israeli detention.
The PRCS announced Asaad’s release on X and shared a video of him reuniting with colleagues.
Sky News has seen images showing Asaad, among other released Palestinians, in a grey tracksuit at al Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, where he is undergoing medical examination, according to the PRCS.
Sky News investigated how the attack on the aid workers unfolded – unearthing new evidence earlier this month contradicting Israel’s official account of what happened.
The Israeli military later released the findings of its own investigation into the incident, saying it had dismissed a deputy commander for providing an “inaccurate report”.
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How two hours of terror unfolded
The PRCS claimed the Israeli military’s investigation was “full of lies”.
Asaad’s voice can be heard in a video, initially published by the New York Times, that shows the moments leading up to the attack on the aid workers.
The video was discovered on Rifaat Radwaan’s phone, which was found on his body by rescue workers five days after the attack.
Among those killed were one UN worker, eight paramedics from the PRCS and six first responders from Civil Defence – the official fire and rescue service of Gaza’s Hamas-led government.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
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