British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will have barely set foot in the office of 10 Downing Street before he flies to Washington next week to attend a NATO summit. A week later, he will host 50 European leaders for a security meeting at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
It’s a crash course in global governance for Mr Starmer, British Labour Prime Minister for 14 years. But it will also give him the opportunity to project an image of Britain that is unusual in the post-Brexit era: a stable, conventional, centre-left country amid a rising tide of politically unstable allies.
In Washington, Mr Starmer will meet President Biden, who is resisting calls to abandon his re-election bid because of age-related decline. He will meet President Emmanuel Macron, whose bid to push back the far right in France seems to have had the opposite effect, and with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose coalition was weakened by the advance of the extreme right in the European Parliament elections.
Mr Starmer success with the Labour Party Britain’s embrace of a centre-left party might raise hopes for some, but it is equally plausible that Britain could be a harbinger of something else: an anti-presidential revolt and a latent populism, embodied in Britain by the centre-left party. Insurgent Reformist Partywhat could happen elsewhere. This was the case in 2016, when voters supported the Brexit referendum six months before the election of Donald J. Trump in the United States.
The UK’s shift to Labour is not so much about ideology, analysts say, but rather a weariness with conservative rule and a distrust of political institutions in general. This weariness also exists in France, under an unpopular centrist president, and in the United States, under an aging Democratic president.
For now, however, diplomats said Mr Starmer’s remarkable election victory would give him political stardom among his fellow leaders, for whom such victories have been rare in recent times.
“This huge victory means he’ll be mobbed by crowds at the NATO summit,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington. “Everyone will want to talk to him, everyone will want a selfie with him.”
Depending on the outcome of the US presidential election, Mr Starmer could one day even find himself in a position similar to that of another German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was seen as a bulwark of the rules-based international order when Mr Trump was president.
For Mr Starmer to take on that role, however, he will need to find a way to revive the British economy, according to Mr Darroch. Diplomatic power is correlated with economic power, and Britain’s anaemic economy, combined with its decision to leave the European Union — diminished the country’s role in international affairs.
Mr Darroch also said Mr Starmer should overcome his reputation for caution and try to do something bold with Europe. He ruled out joining the bloc’s vast single economic market because that would mean giving EU citizens the freedom to live and work in Britain, or in its customs union, which would mean accepting some of the bloc’s rules on tariffs and customs duties.
Any meaningful deal would involve difficult compromises, but Mr Starmer, who opposed leaving the European Union, does not carry the baggage of his Conservative predecessors like Boris Johnson, who led the Brexit campaign and developed a reputation as someone who relished fighting with Europeans.
“They didn’t feel insulted by Labour in the way they did by the Conservatives,” said Mr Darroch, who also served as Britain’s permanent representative to the European Union. “He doesn’t have that heritage, he doesn’t have that background.”
Mr Starmer travelled widely abroad as a human rights lawyer. But his expertise is not limited to foreign policy, and during the election campaign he sought to avoid engaging with the Conservative government on the two major issues of the day: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Mr Starmer has pledged to maintain British military support for Ukraine, which has enjoyed broad public support since the start of the war. As Labour leader, he has worked hard to shake off a reputation for hostility towards Nato and suspicion of the military that had taken root under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.
“One of the things that was disastrous under Corbyn was that he had no commitment to NATO, he had no commitment to defence, and people didn’t like that,” said Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester.
Israel and Gaza pose a more delicate problem for Mr Starmer. He has called for a ceasefire in the conflict but has been slow to achieve one, angering the left wing of his party as well as Labour’s Muslim supporters.
The electoral fallout was greater than expected. Jonathan Ashworth, a Labour MP who was likely to be appointed to Mr Starmer’s cabinet, unexpectedly lost his seat in Leicester South to Shockat Adam, an independent who said: “This is for the people of Gaza“, during his victory speech.
Even Mr Starmer’s share of the vote in his own north London seat reduced by 17 percentage points compared to the 2019 elections, partly because of a challenge by an independent who expressed anger at Labour’s stance on Israel and the Gaza war.
Israel may continue to irritate Mr Starmer, as it has with Mr Biden and Mr Macron. Both have been criticised for supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for too long and for failing to condemn more forcefully Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war.
David Lammy, appointed foreign secretary by Mr Starmer on Friday, described his boss’s approach to war as shaped by his experience as a human rights lawyer. an interview in April that Mr Starmer would continue to support Israel but demand that it comply with international law.
“The situation in Gaza is a description of hell on earth,” Mr Lammy said. “A man-made famine, no meaningful medical aid, people eating cactus. Labour has played the best possible role as an opposition party.”
Mr Lammy said a Labour government would fuse progressive values with a realistic approach to the world – a formula he called “progressive realism”.
“There was a lot of wishful thinking in the era of Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak,” Mr Lammy said, referring to the four Conservative prime ministers who preceded Mr Starmer. “And a return to a bygone era, without enough attention to the challenges of today.”
