Keir Starmer gave a speech to try to defend his position as prime minister on Monday morning (Alamy)

5 min read1 hr

The Prime Minister is attempting to see off potential leadership challenges following Thursday’s local election results, which saw Labour lose the Senedd in Wales for the first time, fail to make inroads against the SNP in Scotland, and lose around 1,500 seats on local councils in England.

In a speech in London on Monday morning, he admitted that “like every government, we’ve made mistakes”, but insisted “we got the big political choices right”. It was a speech that was passionate, but lacking in policy meat on the bone.

What is the Labour Party for?

Starmer attacked both Reform and the Green Party, arguing that only Labour can “face up to the big challenges” and “make the big arguments”.

“Delivery is, of course, essential, but it’s not sufficient on its own to address the frustration that voters feel, with battling Reform and the Greens, but at a deeper level, with battling the despair on which they prey, despair that they exploit and amplify,” he said.

“And so analysis matters, but argument matters more. Evidence matters, but so too does the emotion. Stories beat spreadsheets. People need hope.”

He went on to say that the Labour Party would not be able to win going forwards as a “weaker version of Reform or the Greens”. 

“We can only win as a stronger version of Labour… I will never stop fighting for the decent, respectful, diverse country that I love.”

The status quo is not enough

He appeared to argue for railing against the status quo in government, but did not set out any major new policies.

“Incremental change won’t cut it on growth, defence, Europe, energy,” he said.

“We need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times, and this is a political challenge, just as much as it’s a party challenge.”

By way of hard policy, however, there was very little: the one major announcement was that legislation would be brought forward this week to give the government powers to take “full ownership of British Steel”, subject to a public-interest test.

Starmer described this as an example of a policy which will “show the Labour values we will be guided from, and the lessons we will learn”.

He said the government would also go “much further on our investment” in apprenticeships in technical excellence colleges and special educational needs.

Starmer has come under criticism by his own MPs for not spearheading the change that was promised to voters in the 2024 general election. 

Senior Labour MP Sarah Owen told The Times over the weekend: “Unless Keir Starmer delivers tangible change and truly connects with the public on a human level, he can’t lead us into another election (locally or nationally). People want politics and politicians who are upfront and true to their values.”

Closer ties with Europe at the heart of the “Labour choice”

Starmer also set out a closer relationship with Europe as being at the heart of the “Labour choice” going forward. 

“This Labour government will be defined by rebuilding our relationship with Europe, by having Britain at the heart of Europe, standing shoulder to shoulder with the countries that most share our interests, our values and our enemies,” he said.

“That is the right choice for Britain. That is the Labour choice.”

However, asked whether the next Labour manifesto would include single market or customs union membership, Starmer simply said the UK will take a “big leap forward with the EU-UK summit this year and take us closer, both on trade and the economy, and defence and security.

“That will then be a platform on which we can build as we go forward,” he said.

Change in leadership would be too “damaging”

Addressing Thursday’s elections, the PM said Labour’s losses “hurt”: “I get it, I feel it”.

But many Labour MPs are already concerned that the speech listed the government’s achievements again and did little to shift the dial on either Starmer’s own leadership or the public perception of the Labour government.

Backbench Labour MP and former minister Catherine West has said she could try to launch her own leadership bid if no cabinet minister steps forward to challenge Starmer.

Former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has told Starmer that “what we are doing isn’t working”, calling for Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to return to Parliament. Indeed, perhaps the most significant moment of Starmer’s speech came when he said that Burnham’s return would be a matter for the party’s National Executive Committee, rather than closing the door on him entirely.

Starmer had already insisted he will not step down as PM, and in his speech on Monday, he said he did not want to “plunge the country into chaos”.

“I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I’ve got some doubters, including in my own part,” he said. 

“And I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I have to prove them wrong, and I will.”

In what was likely an appeal to his own MPs, he said that the government constantly changing their leadership was “damaging”.

“We tested it, we tested its destruction, and it inflicted huge damage on this country,” he said, in a reference to the changing of leaders under previous Conservative governments.

“A Labour government will never be forgiven if we repeat that and inflict that on the country.”

Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell sat on the front row during Starmer’s speech, with one of the PM’s PPSs Jon Pearce sitting on the row behind.

Labour MP for Ossett and Denby Dale Jade Botterill introduced Starmer on the stage, saying that it was clear to her that the Labour Party “is one of the greatest vehicles for changing the lives of working people this country has ever known”

“But yet, on the doorstep, people no longer believed it.”

Ralph Fiennes as Henry Irving and Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry | Photography by: Marc Brenner

5 min read13 min

This is a play about what a play is about. It is an examination of theatre and the acting profession.

That I took an instant dislike to Teddy was a tribute to Jordan Metcalfe’s point-perfect interpretation of the arrogant Edward ‘Teddy’ Gordon Craig who opens the play recalling his mother, the superstar of Victorian drama, Ellen Terry with the question, “What is it like to be a genius?”

Not that he seems a great fan of his mother, remarking that “if one is still an actor at 40, you need to ask yourself some serious questions”. It is a line that the 78-year-old David Hare must have enjoyed writing, and one which the audience fully appreciated the nuance of.

The play’s title, Grace Pervades, is another blague privée intended for the theatrical cognoscenti. It refers to a less than kind contemporary review, that said of her performances “Grace pervades the hussy”. Not much used in modern parlance, “hussy” is a word to which Terry’s daughter Edith, ‘Edy’, would have taken great exception. Her own dramatic productions were focused on achieving social revolution and the advancement of the suffrage movement.

In fact, living at the bottom of her mother’s garden in a lesbian ménage-à-trois with the occasional “sympathy frig” by Vita Sackville West, Edy might well have had the word applied to herself. However, it must be considered the more remarkable that in the prurient Victorian age, Ellen Terry – whose string of affairs began at the age of 14 – could be deemed such a national sweetheart.

Her amorous liaisons did not prevent her becoming the best-paid woman in England. On one of her American tours, she earned the modern equivalent of £24,000 a week – and just as well. Edy slyly tells us, when disparaging her brother’s theatrical disasters, that “Teddy’s Vikings of Helgeland lost more in a week than Ellen made in a year!”

David Hare has lost none of his powers

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Teddy believes in “a theatre without actors” and in real life became (in retrospect, it must be said) a noted theoretician of drama and performance, revered by the likes of Konstantin Stanislavski and Peter Brook. A self-righteous, arrogant womaniser who had an affair with Isadora Duncan, we are told by sister Edy that in his own short acting career, the other spear carriers in Hamlet threw him off the battlements at the end of one rehearsal!

Now, the man himself: Henry Irving. Or do I mean Ralph Fiennes? It is difficult to tell. Irving regarded the theatre with the utmost seriousness. Meticulous in his preparation, he boasts that his is “a company of equals in which I am the boss”. He admits to Ellen that he is “atrabilious” (yes, I had to look it up too) and “an evening in my company can sometimes be very grim”, yet this is the man who single-handedly transformed 19th-century theatre into a respected art form. On stage he was the charismatic epicentre from which no eye turned, except to alight on Ellen Terry.

Ellen (played by Miranda Raison) was his theatrical and life partner for 27 years. She was “the day to his night”. She it was who persuaded him to direct his gaze away from declamation at the audience and to the other actors on stage. With her, Irving ran the Lyceum Theatre, overpaying his actors, accumulating debt, but entrancing audiences.

“You see everything as tragic,” she tells his Malvolio, “but Twelfth Night is supposed to be a comedy!” For him, theatre always comes first. For her, life does. She just happens to be spectacularly good at being an actress. “We have taken this forsaken art form and taken it to a level it has never aspired to,” he tells her. “To you, the theatre is everything. I’d rather be a successful human being,” she retorts.

In a moment of purity and tenderness, he admits, “A faltering actor until 40, you were the instrument of my transformation.” I cannot remember if it is he or she who then says, “Together we made a harmony we could not make apart.” But of course it does not matter.

And this is the heart of David Hare’s contemplation on what it is to be a player, and what this strange art form is. He gives us four very different approaches in Teddy, Edy, Ellen and Irving. The minimalist, Teddy; the purposeful utilitarian, Edy; the escapist, Ellen; and Henry Irving, for whom the theatre is inextricable from life itself.

If you love theatre, go – these are some of our finest actors paying obeisance to the nobility of their calling and the giants on whose shoulders they stand.

If you do not count yourself a thespian, still go – Hare has lost none of his powers, and some of his one-liners are worth the price of the ticket all on their own.

Barry Gardiner is Labour MP for Brent West

Grace Pervades

Written by: David Hare

Directed by: Jeremy Herrin

Venue: Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1 – until 11 July 2026

Keir Starmer’s attempt to save his premiership with a make-or-break speech went down like a lead balloon on Monday.

He pledged to rebuild the UK’s ties with the EU after Brexit and insisted he would put the country “at the heart of Europe”.

The PM also confirmed plans to nationalise British Steel.

Amid mounting speculation that he will face an imminent leadership challenge, Starmer said: “I know people are frustrated by the state of Britain, frustrated by politics, and some people, frustrated by me.

“I know I have my doubters and I know I need to prove them wrong, and I will.”

However, the initial reaction to the speech was overwhelmingly negative, with one former minister telling HuffPost UK it was “utterly inadequate”.

Other responses on social media were similarly unforgiving.

Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.

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Lord Skidelsky of Tilton: 25 April 1939 – 15 April 2026 | Image courtesy of UK Parliament

4 min read7 min

Robert Skidelsky who died on 15 April 2026 will be remembered as a towering economic historian, a public intellectual, and a politician who was never afraid to speak or to change his mind.

In his political career he was something of a nomad, apparently uncomfortable with the constraints of politics. He left Labour in 1981 to become a founding member of the SDP. Appointed a life peer in 1991, he took the Conservative whip from 1992, briefly becoming a shadow culture, then Treasury, minister. In 2001 he crossed the floor to become a formidable crossbench peer from where he would interrogate ministers for their dependence on Treasury orthodoxy – whether applied to budgets, or the fallacies of austerity. In recent years he became a more controversial figure for his views on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Robert was born in Harbin, China, shortly before the start of the Second World War, the son of wealthy British citizens of Russian ancestry. Interned by the Japanese but released during a prisoner exchange, the family came to Britain where he was educated. (Brighton College and then Jesus College, Oxford.) He remained engaged in the teaching and learning of history and economics and related controversies all his life, including a memorable spat with the revised GCSE history syllabus in 1990. In 2006 he retired from the University of Warwick after 28 years as professor, first of international studies and then of political economy.

His intellectual life was much more consistent than his political journey and more celebrated. His magisterial biography of John Maynard Keynes, without doubt one of the greatest biographies of the last century, was originally intended for publication in 1972 as a modest volume. The first volume was published in 1983. The last of the trilogy was published – to enormous public acclaim – in 2000. It was described by then-chancellor Gordon Brown, himself a man of ideas, as “masterful”.

Most biographers grow to loath their subject. Even the keenest biographers draw the line at moving in with them. Robert revelled in it. He, Augusta, his beloved wife of over 55 years, and their three children, lived for many years In Tilton, where Keynes himself had lived from 1925-46, a stone’s throw from the Bells at Charleston Farmhouse where, in 1919, Keynes had written much of The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

His intellectual life was much more consistent than his political journey and more celebrated

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Even fewer biographers go on to apply their subject’s special subject to solve the problems of a contemporary world. Robert did. He re-introduced Keynes to a new generation facing a global economic challenge in 2008 and showed how when financial crises occur, Keynesian economics, as now prime minister Gordon Brown was to prove, would be critical to restoring economic stability in the place of free market chaos.

Robert drew all the lessons from this. His brilliant analysis of the credit crunch in Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009) was described as “righteous in [its] thunder”.

Robert was no abstract academic. What set him apart was not just clarity of thought and language (woe betide the sloppy generalisation or the misplaced allusion) and his sense of mischief, but also his insistence on the ethical foundations of economics and its human impacts. He was a cartographer of shifting ideas as much as a biographer. In his book How Much is Enough?,

co-authored with his son Edward in 2012 and which decried the obsession with growth, he described his own discipline – economics – as “absurdly narrow”.

His final speech in the House of Lords, on 17 March, railed against youth unemployment. Ending with a 1933 quote from Keynes, it serves as Robert’s valedictory: “‘Look after unemployment, and the budget will look after itself.’ That may be too bold for our rulers today, but I say to the Chancellor that if one wishes to gain anything then one needs to dare in order to gain something.”

Robert dared to think and dared others to do so as well. That is his legacy.

Baroness Andrews is a Labour peer