Keir Starmer’s destinations are baffling (Image: PA)
has spent four weeks of the precious six months he has held power overseas, instead of dealing with the mess at home.
It is good the Prime Minister has had a holiday (bar the embarrassing queue-jumping).
Few prime ministers are worse at the day job after some rest and recuperation – being the honourable exception, as her walking trip in Wales led to a disastrous snap election.
There is a reason why pilots are restricted as to how many hours they can fly and forced to have rest periods.
No prime minister should be left to crash a country because they are too tired to think straight, though ideology rather than exhaustion remains the main cause of Starmer’s woes.
Presenteeism is a terrible affliction. Far better to be recharged and full of energy than always present but burnt out.
Politicians are more than capable of making bad decisions at the best of times, so in the worst of times they need to step away and get some perspective.
is said to have been revitalised from his flashy foreign holidays in Barbados, Tuscany and Sardinia.
David Cameron was known to enjoy “chillaxing” and regularly made time to get away with his family. Though, for some unfathomable reason, he was pictured on three holidays while PM, in the UK and abroad, pointing at fish displayed in markets. Whatever floats your trawler!
Gordon Brown, by contrast, hated holidays and was awkwardly snapped walking along a beach in Weymouth wearing a suit, before dashing back to London at the first opportunity. It did not do him a lot of good.
Starmer’s trip to Madeira was his first family holiday since the election, but not his first time out of the country. He has visited 16 destinations, though not all on separate trips, since the General Election. Some of those are absolutely crucial. His first overseas visit was a Nato summit in Washington just days into the job.
But others are just baffling. The COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan was shunned by most Western leaders – but attended by the Taliban.
Allies insist that in a febrile world, with wars raging that are having huge economic and political ramifications in the UK, it is important the Prime Minister forges good relationships and is a major global player.
That is, of course, correct. But premiers under pressure have often found refuge on the world stage. The only other people on the planet who understand the realities of the job are other unpopular leaders.
Starmer was elected on a promise he would change the UK, not save the world.
Yes, the international picture has very real consequences at home – sky-high energy bills due to the invasion of being one of the most obvious examples.
But the PM’s globe-trotting will do little to bring those bills down. What he has done, however, is make sure they hurt all the more for millions of pensioners who have been stripped of their winter fuel payments.
Starmer has marked the start of the new year with a speech today on one of his six “milestones”, putting more money in the pockets of working people, building 1.5 million homes, treating 92% patients within 18 weeks, recruiting 13,000 more police officers, making sure five-year-olds are “school-ready” and producing 95% clean power by 2030.
With the six-month anniversary since the election having just passed, voters want actions, not words.
The economy has been flatlining, small boat crossings are on the rise and even the strikes Labour spent a fortune trying to stop are starting to spring up again.
Luke Tryl says voters have noticed how much time the PM is overseas, raising it “spontaneously” in focus groups. The director of More in Common explains that the public’s view is not only that these jaunts distract Starmer from his domestic duties, but also that the UK “gets a bad deal” on the international stage.
If Starmer can show tangible results on issues such as migration from his trips, voters “won’t care about travelling”, Tryl adds, but the PM has not done so, with issues like the Chagos Islands handover being viewed by the public as the UK “giving something up and paying for it”.
It’s time Starmer left the taxpayer-funded plane on the tarmac and focused on meeting people up and down the country he leads, who are struggling under his government.