Highs and lows of Five-Year Keir: The PM’s journey from Doughty Street to Downing Street

Published

7 months ago

April 5, 2025

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From Doughty Street to Downing Street: from human rights barrister in a left-wing chambers to a prime minister tough on rioters and illegal migrants.

Five years after becoming Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer has been on a remarkable journey. He turned left to win the party leadership and turned right to win a general election.

It has been five years of dramatic highs and lows: the elation of winning a landslide general election victory after the gloom of contemplating quitting following a by-election humiliation.

As opposition leader, Sir Keir purged the Labour left, including banishing his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn to the political wilderness, and flushed out the scourge of antisemitism.

As prime minister, within weeks of entering Number 10 he was confronted with riots on Britain’s streets. And throughout his premiership he has had to play a leading role internationally in a volatile and war-torn world.

At home, his government’s economic policies have been condemned by political opponents and some of his own MPs as a return to austerity. Labour’s opinion poll ratings have nose-dived.

Abroad, as well as the challenge of defending Ukraine against the brutality of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the so-called “special relationship” with the United States has been tested to the limit by the erratic Donald Trump.

Five-year Keir was elected Labour leader on 4 April 2020, just weeks after prime minister Boris Johnson ordered a COVID lockdown that was ultimately to bring about his demise.

Sir Keir won 56% of the vote, defeating the Corbyn-backed left-wing candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy from Labour’s soft left.

To win the backing of left-wing Labour activists, he backed a wealth tax on the top 5% of earners, abolishing university tuition fees, nationalising water and energy and restoring freedom of movement between the UK and EU countries. Whatever happened to those promises?

There was also a showbiz connection. When he was running for the leadership, a rumour persisted that he was the inspiration for Mark Darcy, the dashing human rights lawyer played by Colin Firth in the Bridget Jones movies.

But, alas for Sir Keir and his spin doctors, who did nothing to dispel the myth, several months after he became leader the Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding laid the rumour to rest – though she conceded they were very similar.

Sir Keir had much bigger battles to fight, however. From day one as leader, he condemned antisemitism as “a stain on our party”. Within weeks he sacked his rival Ms Long-Bailey from his shadow cabinet in a dispute over antisemitism.

But in his ruthless determination to show the party had changed under his leadership, he had a bigger target: his predecessor Mr Corbyn, still the darling of left-wing Labour activists.

After the former leader claimed the scale of antisemitism in the Labour party had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”, Sir Keir struck, suspending him for refusing to retract his comments and then finally expelling him a month before last year’s general election.

But while he was winning that battle, Sir Keir’s first year did not go well at the ballot box. In 2021, in the first by-election after Boris Johnson’s 80-seat victory in the 2019 general election, Labour lost the previously safe seat of Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The swing against Labour was a huge 16%.

It was his lowest low point of the last five years. Stunned by the Hartlepool defeat, Sir Keir panicked, sacking his chief whip Nick Brown and attempting to demote his deputy, Angela Rayner, stripping her of her posts as party chair and campaign coordinator.

But it backfired as she fought back and emerged stronger than ever. She gained the titles of shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for work. Four years later, her Employment Rights Bill is in the House of Lords and on course to become law.

Last year, in a Sky News interview with political editor Beth Rigby, Sir Keir admitted he had considered quitting. “I did, because I didn’t feel that I should be bigger than the party and that if I couldn’t bring about the change, perhaps there should be a change,” he said.

But it wasn’t just the result in Hartlepool that was damaging. In 2022, in a scandal the Conservatives called “beergate”, he and Ms Rayner were accused of breaching lockdown rules by eating curry and drinking beer in Durham while campaigning in the by-election.

He was cleared, but at the height of the Tory onslaught he said he would resign if he was issued with a fixed penalty notice. It was another low point. But in 2022 it was Mr Johnson who was forced to quit over breaking COVID rules, not Sir Keir.

A top civil servant, Sue Gray, produced a damning and ultimately fatal “partygate” report, accusing Mr Johnson of lying to parliament, Liz Truss came and went – her brief 49-day tenure likened to the life of a lettuce – and Rishi Sunak became the Tories’ fifth prime minister in six years.

Sir Keir was on his way. But it was his turn to stun his opponents in 2023 when he announced that Sue Gray was to become his chief of staff, in a move the Tories claimed was treachery and proof that she had been biased against Mr Johnson.

But though she lasted longer than “lettuce” Liz Truss, Sue Gray didn’t survive for long. Within months of Labour’s 2024 election victory she was out, the victim of a vicious power struggle with a Number 10 “boys’ club” led by Starmer’s campaign chief Morgan McSweeney, who helped himself to her job as chief of staff.

On the back of several by-election successes and sweeping local government gains, when Mr Sunak shocked his own party on 22 May by announcing a 4 July general election, Labour entered the campaign as overwhelming favourites to win a big majority.

A turning point in the campaign came on 2 June when Nigel Farage announced a comeback as Reform UK leader and declared that he would, after months of keeping his opponents guessing, be a candidate after all.

As a result, Reform UK won 4.1m votes, piling up votes in the tens of thousands in hundreds of seats, mostly at the expense of the Conservatives, and handing a landslide to Sir Keir: 411 Labour MPs and a majority of 172.

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His triumph came close to rivalling Tony Blair’s landslides of 1997 and 2001 with one crucial difference: Labour polled just 34% of the vote, the lowest share for a party winning a majority.

During the campaign, Sir Keir faced tough scrutiny not just about his pledges not to increase income tax, VAT or national insurance, but also about his character and personality.

In “The Battle for Number 10” on Sky News, a 90-minute event in Grimsby featuring Sir Keir and Mr Sunak, the Labour leader froze when a member of the audience told him he seemed like a “political robot”.

He also squirmed when another audience member challenged him on why he now condemned Mr Corbyn when five years earlier he told voters he would make a great prime minister.

Yet despite those difficult moments, the event was more bruising for Mr Sunak than Sir Keir and a YouGov poll declared a decisive victory for the Labour leader, by 64% to 36%

But there was to be no honeymoon period for Sir Keir after Labour’s landslide. Within days of his election victory, riots following the killing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport presented the new prime minister with a law and order crisis.

His background as Director of Public Prosecutions served him well, however, and he showed a steely determination in ensuring rioters were dealt with swiftly and severely by the courts, though critics hit out at inconsistencies in sentencing and branded him “Two-tier Keir”.

Another crisis was self-inflicted. Many in his own party were shocked by the staggering amount of freebies, gifts and hospitality he and his wife accepted since he became Labour leader, many paid for by a millionaire Labour donor Lord Alli. According to a Sky News investigation, their total worth was more than £100,000.

They included expensive clothes for the PM and his wife, luxury designer spectacles for Sir Keir, hospitality at his beloved Arsenal FC, free accommodation in a flat owned by Lord Alli and – perhaps the most contentious – freebie tickets to a Taylor Swift concert at Wembley Stadium, all worth eye-watering amounts.

To make matters worse, the “freebie-gate” scandal engulfed the PM at a time when his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners, the first of a series of controversial moves by the woman derided as “Rachel from Accounts” by political opponents that have badly damaged Sir Keir’s government in its first nine months.

The two-child benefit cap, national insurance rises in her October budget, benefit cuts last month and no compensation for the so-called Waspi women have all infuriated many Labour MPs and put Sir Keir’s loyalty to his chancellor under strain.

He’s standing by her for now. “I have full confidence in the chancellor,” he declared, tetchily, when challenged by a Tory MP at PMQs just minutes before her spring statement last week.

But for how long? Most prime ministers eventually fall out with their chancellor: Margaret Thatcher with Sir Geoffrey Howe and then Nigel Lawson in the 1980s and later Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Be warned, Rachel!

On foreign policy, the PM’s record is better. His baptism on the world stage, at a NATO summit in Washington in his first week as PM, helped him swiftly establish a reputation as a safe pair of hands and reliable ally on foreign policy.

Though the UK is no longer in the EU, Sir Keir has forged strong alliances with European leaders – particularly France’s President Macron – as he attempts to build a “coalition of the willing” to defend Ukraine. And he has won the trust of Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy.

And on his biggest foreign policy challenge, establishing good relations with the maverick President Trump, the verdict – even after the president’s tariffs bombshell – is so far, so good.

His Trump Tower dinner last September went well, his White House stunt with an envelope containing King Charles’ state visit invitation was a diplomatic masterstroke and the 10% tariffs slapped on the UK could have been a lot worse.

Now comes the really hard part for Five-Year Keir: securing a trade deal with the US, bringing peace to Ukraine without a sell-out or concessions to Vladimir Putin, smashing the gangs smuggling illegal migrants, tackling welfare reform and – the biggest challenge – finding that elusive economic growth at home while the Trump tariffs make autumn tax rises look almost inevitable.

No pressure, then prime minister. If the lows of Sir Keir’s first five years as Labour leader took the shine off the highs, the next five years – to the next election and perhaps beyond – look even more challenging.

And the journey from Doughty Street to Downing Street is now just a distant memory.

Politics

Refugee status set to become temporary in radical asylum reforms

Published

15 hours ago

November 15, 2025

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Refugee status set to become temporary in radical asylum reforms

People granted asylum in the UK will only be allowed to stay in the country temporarily, in sweeping reforms expected to be announced on Monday.

Modelled on the Danish system, the aim is to make the UK less attractive for illegal immigrants and make it easier to deport them.

Planned changes mean that refugee status will become temporary and subject to regular review, with refugees removed as soon as their home countries are deemed safe.

Under current UK rules, those granted refugee status have it for five years and can then apply for indefinite leave to remain and get on a route to citizenship.

In a social media video trailing her announcement, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: “We will always be a country that gives sanctuary to people who are fleeing danger, but we must restore order and control.”

She called it “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times”.

An ally of the home secretary said: “Today, becoming a refugee equals a lifetime of protection in Britain.

“Mahmood will change that, making refugee status temporary and subject to regular review. The moment your home country is safe to return to, you will be removed.

“While this might seem like a small technical shift, this new settlement marks the most significant shift in the treatment of refugees since the Second World War.”

Time and money ‘wasted’ on Rwanda scheme

While the number of asylum claims across Europe has fallen, numbers in Britain have risen.

Ms Mahmood said the previous government had had “years to tackle this problem” but had “wasted” time and money on the £700m Rwanda scheme.

Some 39,075 people have arrived in the UK after making the journey across the Channel so far this year, according to the latest Home Office figures.

That is an increase of 19% on the same point in 2024 and up 43% on 2023, but remains 5% lower than at the equivalent point in 2022, which remains the peak year for crossings.

Other changes expected to be announced on Monday include requiring judges to prioritise public safety over migrants’ rights to a family life, or the risk that they will face “inhuman” treatment if returned to their home country, the Telegraph has reported.

Denmark’s tighter rules on family reunions are also being looked at.

What are Denmark’s migration rules?

Denmark has adopted increasingly restrictive rules in order to deal with migration over the last few years.

In Denmark, most asylum or refugee statuses are temporary. Residency can be revoked once a country is deemed safe.

In order to achieve settlement, asylum seekers are required to be in full-time employment, and the length of time it takes to acquire those rights has been extended.

Denmark also has tougher rules on family reunification – both the sponsor and their partner are required to be at least 24 years old, which the Danish government says is designed to prevent forced marriages.

The sponsor must also not have claimed welfare for three years and must provide a financial guarantee for their partner. Both must also pass a Danish language test.

In 2018, Denmark introduced what it called a ghetto package, a controversial plan to radically alter some residential areas, including by demolishing social housing. Areas with over 1,000 residents were defined as ghettos if more than 50% were “immigrants and their descendants from non-Western countries”.

In 2021, the left of centre government passed a law that allowed refugees arriving on Danish soil to be moved to asylum centres in a partner country – and subsequently agreed with Rwanda to explore setting up a program, although that has been put on hold.

Changes will prevent refugees from ‘integrating into British life’

While some research has suggested that deterrence policies have little impact on asylum seekers’ choice of destination, but a 2017 study said Denmark’s “negative nation branding” had proved effective in limiting asylum applications.

The number of successful asylum claims has fallen to a 40-year low in Denmark, with 95% of failed asylum seekers deported from the country.

But some believe the changes could damage future generations seeking a haven from war, persecution and violence.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of Refugee Council, said: “These sweeping changes will not deter people from making dangerous crossings, but they will unfairly prevent men, women and children from putting down roots and integrating into British life.

“Refugee status represents safety from the conflict and persecution that people have fled.

“When refugees are not stuck in limbo, they feel a greater sense of belonging, as full members of their new communities with a stable future for themselves, their children and generations to come.

“We urge the government to rethink these highly impractical plans, which will also add to the backlog and chaos that the Home Office is tackling.

“Instead, they should ensure that refugees who work hard and contribute to Britain can build secure, settled lives and give back to their communities.”

Shabana Mahmood will be appearing on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips from 8.30am tomorrow.

Politics

Bitcoin falls to 6-month low as ETF demand collapses: Finance Redefined

Published

1 day ago

November 14, 2025

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Bitcoin falls to 6-month low as ETF demand collapses: Finance Redefined

Cryptocurrency markets have extended their decline despite much-awaited political developments taking place in the US.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed a funding bill to end the record 43-day US government shutdown, after the bill passed through the Senate on Monday and was approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday.

The bill provides funding to the government until Jan. 30, 2026, and gives Democrats and Republicans more time to strike a deal on broader funding plans for the year ahead.

The end of the shutdown failed to lift demand among Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) buyers. Spot BTC ETFs saw a brief resurgence on Tuesday, attracting $524 million in inflows, but outflows quickly resumed, with a whopping $866 million in daily net outflows on Thursday, according to Farside Investors.

Bitcoin fell to a six-month low of $95,900 on Friday, a level last seen in May as its biggest demand drivers continued to lack momentum.

Investments from ETFs and Michael Saylor’s Strategy were the two main vehicles driving demand for Bitcoin’s price this year, according to Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of crypto analytics platform CryptoQuant.

*BTC/USD, one-year chart. Source: Cointelegraph*

Bitcoin ETF demand stalls as US shutdown optimism fails to lift sentiment

The lack of demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs is raising concerns about Bitcoin’s prospects for the rest of the year.

On Monday, the US Senate approved the funding bill and brought Congress a step closer to ending the shutdown. The legislation headed for a full vote in the House of Representatives, which occurred on Wednesday.

Despite optimistic news from the US, spot Bitcoin ETF investments remained flat on Monday, with just $1.2 million of inflows, according to data from Farside Investors.

*Bitcoin ETF Flows, US dollars (in millions). Source: Farside Investors*

“Despite the US shutdown seemingly ending, and the S&P and Gold bouncing hard, Bitcoin ETFs saw NO bid yesterday,” said Capriole Investments founder, Charles Edwards, adding that this is not a dynamic we want to see continue.

“Risk assets usually see a strong bid in the weeks out of the Shutdown. Still time to turn this ship around, but it needs to turn,” Edwards wrote in a Tuesday X post.

Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows were the primary driver of Bitcoin’s momentum in 2025, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, told Cointelegraph recently.

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Bitwise exec says 2026 will be crypto’s real bull year; here’s why

Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan is more confident that crypto markets will boom in 2026, particularly as there hasn’t been a late 2025 rally.

Speaking to Cointelegraph at The Bridge conference in New York City on Wednesday, Hougan said a crypto market rally at the end of 2025 would have fit the four-year cycle thesis, meaning 2026 would mark the start of a bear market, similar to 2022 and 2018.

When asked to revise his prediction about whether the crypto market will boom in 2026, Hougan said: “I’m actually more confident in that quote. The biggest risk was [if] we ripped into the end of 2025 and then we got a pullback.”

Hougan said interest in the Bitcoin debasement trade, stablecoins and tokenization would continue to accelerate, while arguing that Uniswap’s fee switch proposal introduced on Monday would reinvigorate interest in decentralized finance protocols in the coming year.

“I think the underlying fundamentals are just so sound,” Hougan said. “I think these earlier forces, institutional investment, regulatory progress, stablecoins, tokenization, I just think those are too big to keep down. So I think 2026 will be a good year.”

*Matt Hougan at The Bridge conference in New York City. Source: Cointelegraph*

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Arthur Hayes tells Zcash holders to withdraw from CEXs and “shield” assets

The privacy coin sector returned to the spotlight after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes urged Zcash holders to withdraw their assets from centralized exchanges (CEXs).

On Wednesday, Hayes told holders to “shield” their assets, a feature that enables private transactions within the Zcash network. “If you hold $ZEC on a CEX, withdraw it to a self-custodial wallet and shield it,” Hayes wrote on X.

The comments came as Zcash (ZEC) saw sharp price swings in the last few days. The token rallied to $723 on Saturday before dropping to $504 on Sunday. It then surged to a high of $677 on Monday, only to see another sharp decline. At the time of writing, ZEC was trading at about $450, marking a 37% decline from its Saturday high.

Analysts had warned that ZEC might undergo a sharp correction due to its relative strength index (RSI) reaching its highest reading after continuing to rally above its overbought zone.

*Zcash’s seven-day price chart. Source: CoinGecko*

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Vitalik Buterin champions decentralization in “Trustless Manifesto”

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has authored and signed the new “Trustless Manifesto,” which seeks to uphold core values of decentralization and censorship resistance and push builders to refrain from adding intermediaries and checkpoints for the sake of adoption.

The Trustless Manifesto, also authored by Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, said crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the first moment that they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer, explaining that while it feels harmless, it becomes a habit, and with each passing checkpoint, the protocol becomes less and less permissionless.

“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the Ethereum Foundation members said in the manifesto published Wednesday. “Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core.”

“When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point.”

*Extract from The Trustless Manifesto. Source:* *Trustlessness.eth*

While the manifesto wasn’t aimed at any particular person or company, some Ethereum layer 2s have been criticized for sacrificing decentralization to focus on scalability to speed up adoption.

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Sonic Labs pivots from speed to survival with business-first strategy

Sonic Labs, the organization behind the Sonic layer-1 blockchain, announced a major strategic shift as it pivots from emphasizing transaction speed to building long-term business value and token sustainability.

After claiming industry-leading performance last year, Sonic Labs said its next chapter will focus on upgrades that deliver measurable financial outcomes, including new Ethereum and Sonic Improvement Proposals (EIPs and SIPs), token supply reductions and revamped rewards for network participants.

“Every decision we make moving forward will be guided by the principles of building real value, with price, growth, and sustainability always in focus,” said Mitchell Demeter, the new CEO of Sonic Labs.

The focus aims to bring “measurable, lasting value” for builders, validators and tokenholders, wrote Demeter in a Tuesday X post. “Our mission at Sonic is to move beyond hype and build a sustainable business model for a layer one, that creates, captures, and returns real value to tokenholders.”

The new fee monetization upgrade will include a tiered reward system for builders and fixed rewards for validators.

Sonic Labs will also increase the rate of programmatic Sonic (S) token burns, which means permanently removing tokens from circulation to tighten the supply.

Sonic claims to be the world’s fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain, with a “true” finality of 720 milliseconds (ms) — the assurance that a transaction is irreversible, which occurs after it is added to a block on the blockchain ledger.

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DeFi market overview

According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the red.

The privacy-preserving Dash (DASH) token fell 45% to stage the biggest decline in the top 100, followed by the Internet Computer (ICP) token, down over 27% on the weekly chart.

*Total value locked in DeFi. Source: DefiLlama*

Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.