LONDON — Less than 100 days into his Labour administration, Keir Starmer’s poll lead over the Conservatives he trounced at Britain’s general election has slumped to a single point. That’s the stark finding of a survey of 2,023 adults conducted by pollster More in Common and shared with POLITICO London Playbook. The survey, conducted over […]
Category Archives: UK Politics
LONDON — Keir Starmer has made a big play as he seeks to get a grip on his troubled time in Downing Street — but he’s by no means escaped the danger zone. Starmer entered No. 10 in July in a position of unusual strength after securing Labour’s biggest election win since 1997. But it […]
LONDON — The Conservatives tore into the U.K. government’s decision to hand the disputed Chagos Islands, home of a key U.S. military base, to Mauritius. The opposition party on Monday lambasted Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s explanation for why Mauritius is being given control of the archipelago, which has been described as the U.K.’s last African […]
LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has drafted in a senior communications expert from tech giant TikTok as he tries to reboot his struggling Downing Street operation. James Lyons, a veteran political journalist-turned-comms guru, joins the British government from the Chinese-owned social media firm, where he’s been working as head of policy comms across […]
Boris Johnson retracted his apology for the Covid rule-breaching Partygate scandal that helped call time on his stint as British prime minister. In his upcoming memoir “Unleashed,” Johnson wrote that he made a “mistake” in offering “pathetic” and “groveling” apologies for the row, which “made it look as though we were far more culpable than […]
Argentina vowed Thursday to “recover” the Falkland Islands from Britain, after the U.K. government gave up control of a different archipelago in the Indian Ocean. “With concrete actions and not empty rhetoric, we will recover full sovereignty over our Malvinas Islands. The Malvinas [the Spanish name] were, are and will always be Argentine,” Buenos Aires’ Foreign […]
LONDON — Boris Johnson claimed he found a listening device in his personal bathroom at the British Foreign Office after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used it. The former prime minister alleged that his security team found bugging devices in the toilets after Netanyahu had used the facilities. The pair met in 2017 when Johnson […]
LONDON — The U.K. agreed to pass sovereignty of the disputed Chagos Islands to Mauritius after decades of campaigning — with one big caveat. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Mauritian counterpart Pravind Jugnauth hailed a “seminal moment” Thursday as a political agreement was struck on the future of the islands, which have been […]
LONDON — The BBC has canceled a primetime interview with Boris Johnson after the former prime minister was accidentally sent internal briefing notes intended for BBC staff. Johnson, who was U.K. prime minister between 2019 and 2022, was due to be interviewed Thursday for 30 minutes on BBC One as part of a promotional tour […]
Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist. BIRMINGHAM, U.K. — It wasn’t boring; psychotic episodes rarely are. The Conservative Party, fresh from its worst defeat in a century, gathered in Birmingham to choose its sixth leader in eight years: blind men fighting for spectacles. The question is: do they chase their left wing, which fled to […]