The Keir Starmer Interview: The analysis | BBC Newscast

Chris, hello. Hi. In theory, I think I was meant to be talking to you from Makerfield, where you were going to be doing a focus group. I was due to be heading to Wigan and then on to Hindley, I think. Of course, because Makerfield is not a place, it's the name of the constituency. Yeah, so I think it was Hindley we were going to be heading to, a community in the constituency, to record with the group More In Common, a focus group. But I was just going to sit in the corner of the room and watch it. And actually... You weren't going to participate. I was not. Certainly not. But I wasn't going to ask questions either. I was going to sit there with a sort of... I even wondered whether I could even be seen to be taking notes, because would that sort of interfere somehow? Because people might think I'm writing down... A two-way screen or one-way screen is what you need. Exactly, exactly. Anyway, newscaster Joe Pike is there instead. Right. And we will see and hear that focus group on Friday night and then over the weekend. But yes, my trip to the by-election... My third trip, it would have been, in the end didn't happen. And you did a much shorter trip because it is only a 10-minute walk from our office at Westminster to Number 10 Dining Street. Yeah, so I got a call late last night offering an interview with the Prime Minister. I've been asking for quite a while, given the splash of news about. And they invited me in. And it's a privilege of this job that I get to interview the Prime Minister and the senior politicians pretty frequently. But what was different about this one was that the Prime Minister was really keen that he had space to develop an argument. So often when we do these interviews, we'll be often on a trip with the Prime Minister and the political editors, so Beth Rigby at Sky and Robert Peston at ITV and Andy Bell at 5 News, etc. We've all got like six minutes each or whatever, because otherwise the Prime Minister would be doing these interviews for hours and end when he's trying to represent the UK on the international stage. And the pressure of time basically compels lots of interruptions, even if you're not interrupting to pick him up on something, because you're just aware that the clock's ticking down. And with this one, I didn't have that pressure. I mean, clearly I'm not still in Dining Street now, so I didn't go on forever and over and over. But he was really keen to be able to develop his argument. And I think partly because I think he feels more comfortable when he can do that. And then partly he had a lot to say because he had a lot to push back on, given all the stuff about defence and indeed about his leadership. And you can hear the difference between a six-minute kind of round-robin interview and a 22-minute-ish more podcast-y style interview in the previous episode of Newscast, which is in your feeds now, which is Chris's unedited conversation with Keir Starmer. And what you'll hear now is me and Chris talking about what we learned from that interview. But first of all, do you want to just set a bit of, I hate this word, context, but it is very important. What's the context? Well, you know, he lost his defence secretary yesterday, didn't he? And armed forces minister. And indeed his armed forces minister as well. And where the central critique of John Healey, the departing defence secretary, was to say that the plan that the prime minister was seeking to get the defence secretary, the government and the country to sign up to risks not keeping the UK safe. You cannot say something more wounding, damaging, politically sharpening than that as a defence secretary when you're leaving office of a sitting prime minister. That is huge, irrespective of everything else about the prime minister's future and the elections and the by-election and all that stuff. It's huge. So I think he was acutely aware that that was the immediate context. Because if you have a story out there, a narrative out there, an accusation out there with the credibility that it comes with from a departing defence secretary, as a prime minister in any circumstance, you can't let that sit for long. If you are, particularly if you're of the view that, confronted by all the trade-offs, et cetera, et cetera, that he does, that he thinks he just doesn't think it's right. He thinks it's wrong. And he wanted to disagree with that and set out why he thought there was a plausible alternative argument. And Chris, as we discussed in Newscast on Thursday, the catalyst for John Healey's resignation was the wrangling over this defence investment plan, which is this multi-billion pound, multi-year plan to upgrade Britain's armed forces for the conflicts of the future, which was born out of the defence review, which was published last summer. And actually going back to that review, it says, oh, and we will back this up with a defence investment plan published in autumn 2025. And here we are in kind of mid-summer 2026, and it's still not here. Anyway, here is Keir Starmer telling you, Chris, basically kind of a defence of what he's already done on defence. Obviously, we're living in a very volatile world. We've got the conflict in Ukraine now in its fifth year. And we've got conflict in the Middle East, specifically Iran. That is as dangerous and volatile a world as any of us have lived in. And we absolutely have to step up to that. That requires me as Prime Minister to make hard-edged decisions, hard-edged decisions. And I've taken two, because defence and security are my number one priority. He was also saying in this interview that he'd already increased defence spending, and he'd already had to do a difficult thing to do that, which was to cut international aid. So I think he was asking for a bit of credit for having already done what he sees as quite a big thing in defence, irrespective of what John Healey is accusing him of not doing now. Yes, exactly. So I was really struck by that. And it's worth, for newscasters, just unpacking an element of the timeline here. So he was trying to make an argument there that says, hang on a minute, look how far we've got already, because of the increase in defence funding that there has been since the general election, and then the target that will be hit, which is clearing 2.5% of national income by April of next year. And the key thing in understanding the defence investment plan RAU is to recognise that the starting line for that RAU is next April. It's kind of going beyond that. And the accusation that we heard from critics yesterday, including John Healey, that the pace of increase from next April to the end of the decade is far, far too slow, and therefore raises the credibility, a question around the credibility of whether from 2030 to 2035, you could then get to 3.5% of national income being spent on what's seen as core defence in that five-year window, particularly because it is, I think, reasonable to be more sceptical about spending commitments that are made a long time ahead, rather than ones that are much more imminent. And then on that crucial question of trade-offs and choices, him making the point about international aid, as you mentioned, and then secondly, and again, this goes into sort of Westminster machinations a bit, but I think it's important, him saying, look, it is difficult to reopen conversations with cabinet colleagues about their own budgets after the point they've been signed off. So when you have a spending review, it sets out those budgets, and then cabinet ministers go along, go off to do their jobs, kind of knowing the kind of financial envelope that they're operating with within. That has been unpicked. And he said to me, he'd got money out of every department, which is effectively going into the pot to be passed on to defence. Did you manage to secure cuts from every member of your cabinet in their respective departments to help pay for defence? Yes, everybody is contributing to this. Every single one. It's very important that they do. What I'm not doing is taking out day-to-day spending, because I'm not prepared to cut out public services, but every department is contributing to this. It is a collective effort, if you like, towards a really important priority of the government. And that is why, you know, I say the first uplift was a decision to cut overseas development aid, a hard-edged decision. The second is the one taken by me in recent weeks, which is to do that reallocation within the government departments, outside of a spending review. And that has been done. That is the decision. And the defence investment plan will now be published before NATO, as I've always said. And I've been discussing with the new defence secretary and the chief defence staff this morning. Clearly, the wider question it raises is, if the critique is that process hasn't generated enough money, clearly that is the critique of some, maybe the process was never going to be good enough to do that. And you're into a question then about, you know, do you have to, as some critics say, go much harder after getting welfare spending down, or do you have to think of some alternative mechanism of funding defence? The Liberal Democrats have talked about a defence bond, for instance. So, yeah, but within the scope of what he's decided to do, he said he was making these hard-edged choices that involved difficult trade-offs. And actually, Chris, that then makes you realise kind of the kind of original problem with this whole process is that if you've done your spending review as a prime minister and a chancellor at all, for what you're going to spend for the rest of this parliament, and that's quite a cutthroat process that involves a lot of hard-edged choices, whatever hard-edged choice actually is, classic Starmer phrase there, then you commission a massive review, which is really wide-ranging and forward-thinking and comes with a huge price tag. But you've already set your envelope as it's known for what you're going to spend. So it's like maybe there's an argument that he should have seen this coming as soon as he commissioned the defence review, maybe? Yeah, and that if you are embarking on something that is clearly difficult, reopening, I mean, again, you can run this in any sort of parallel in our own lives, really, about anything, it doesn't have to be money. If you reopen something that the person on the other side of the conversation thinks is agreed, then the starting point is probably going to be one of at least mild irritation from the person on the other side of the table, which therefore potentially, to stretch that thought, might put an upper limit on what you're going to be able to squeeze out of those conversations. So in that sense, you can see how two things can be right. And this is the value in hearing, as we did from John Healey yesterday, and then you hear from the Prime Minister. He's clearly had a pretty difficult and pretty spiky set of conversations with loads of these cabinet ministers about them handing money back that they thought had been negotiated to be theirs or in their department. And also money that was for investment. It wasn't just money to pay the day-to-day bills in their department. It was money that they were thinking they had to invest to buy good stuff. And so often government ministers will make an argument that the way you can transform the country, the way that you can be a transformative government is the money that you spend on longer-term projects that then bring social or economic value for potentially decades ahead, as opposed to the day-to-day, which of course is important, which is paying the wages of a teacher or whatever. So there's an opportunity cost to taking away that capital spending, and sure, cabinet ministers have made that argument to him, but the argument I'm hearing from them is that they've gone through this pretty difficult process, pretty chewy process with cabinet ministers. We've heard, because it's been reported, that one or two of them pushed back quite vociferously, and he's got a certain amount of money out of it. He's talked about the whole question of cutting money from international aid. You might remember in that essay writing competition that was going on during half-term a few weeks ago, Tony Blair talked about, in his view, the damage that that causes, and it might not be a popular argument for many to crank it back up again, but that it would be a useful thing. So the prime minister can point to the difficult decisions with his colleagues, the difficult trade-offs, say, with international aid, but he then still confronts the reality that as far as John Healey's concerned, Al-Qaeda's concerned, plenty of people who've served in the military are concerned, it's not touching the sides in terms of the money that they think defence needs. And then we will find out when the defence investment plan is ever published, and his commitment is to do it before the NATO summit in Ankara in a couple of weeks' time. Everyone's sort of thinking it might be next week, but I suspect that might be a bit soon if they're having to find a way of re-presenting it, so it doesn't sound like it's the thing John Healey rejected. Completely. I mean, on the timing, so as you say, sticking to the same public deadline, Dan Jarvis, the new defence secretary, will go to a NATO defence ministers' meeting next Thursday. He has to decide, and the government now has to decide, are they just going to press on with it and publish it, or is there scope for some sort of rewriting? But the thing is, it's not really rewriting, because, OK, there might be some arguments to go on about what's in it in terms of what the money is being spent on. The critique is principally one of, is there enough money? And if there is an acknowledgement that that's not the case, then the process gets infinitely more complicated. The twist, of course, is that in the next three weeks, there is that by-election in Makefield, and what happens after that is, well, things could change quite a lot in the next three weeks. Also, when the dip, as I'm now calling it, does land, the defence investment plan, John Healey's allies have given us a very good yardstick to sort of judge it by, basically saying, if we get to a point where defence spending as a share of GDP, so the national economy overall, by 2030 is 2.68% as a result of this defence investment plan, John Healey's allies have made it very clear that's not good enough. So as soon as it hits our inboxes, we'll be working out if that's what it is, or if it's more than 2.68%. Yeah, and again, as I think we said on an earlier edition of Newscast, we are still in quite an asymmetric conversation around all of this, because there was a spectacular amount of chit-chat, including from you and I, about something we've not seen yet, the defence investment plan. We've seen the commentary and interpretation of two principal figures in its compilation, the former defence secretary and the current prime minister, but we haven't actually seen it yet. Now, let's get on to part two of your interview, which was a bit more broader than defence, and was a lot about just Keir Starmer's own position as prime minister. And the next bit I want to play is just so interesting, because in your mind, you think this message Keir Starmer's got is aimed, as you would expect, at opposition politicians, the other parties that want to be in the government. But now, because of the weird situation Keir Starmer's in in the Labour Party, actually it's addressed at people who want his job internally. Very many people, very often sitting outside of government, give the impression that there are lots of easy decisions that can be taken. Well, these are often people who work in government, with you. There are no easy decisions. For every decision, there has to be the question, what are you not going to do? So, every time somebody says, this is what... There will always be people who will say, spend more on defence. I get that. There will never be a day that isn't a criticism. There will always be people in that gap. There will be always people saying, I would do this, I would do that, I'd do the other. The question back to them is, what is it you wouldn't do? Because government is about trade-offs, it's about priorities, it's about making the right decisions. The decisions to increase defence to 2.6% by 2027, and now to add to that, the defence investment plan, they're the right decisions for this country and that's why I've taken it. A, he is sort of almost challenging Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham there, and B, he actually sounds actually quite almost jocular about it. Like, he sounds confident. Yeah, he does. He really does. Perhaps the most confident in the interview on that particular topic, or that theme, if you like. Effectively saying, look, you've not done the job. This is really difficult. It's easy to chuck ideas in from the sidelines. Oh, and by the way, if you were doing the job, much of the fundamentals would be exactly, I mean, all of the fundamentals would be exactly the same. So yeah, I think he clearly sees a frustration, not just in the political predicament that he's in, which you would if you were him, but I think he sees, there's an element of him suggesting a certain shallowness to some of the critiques that come his way. And also the critiques have kept on coming from those potential challengers. I just noticed Wes Streeting's social media, which is very active all the time, is particularly active this afternoon, and he's saying two things. One, how come if there's not enough money for defence, the government has today announced £4.5 billion to spend on walking and cycling over the next five years. Intriguing, because I think as a health secretary, Wes Streeting probably would have welcomed that, because that gets more activity into people's lives, which is potentially good for the NHS. And then the other thing he's talking about is, well, the prime minister said to you, Chris, that defence is his number one priority. Recently, number one priority was economic growth. So have we now got two number one priorities, which is a criticism that Starmer's faced before of having too many priorities. And I noticed that the final four words of the Wes Streeting critique, there's quite a few, isn't there, posts here, but it says, make choices, decide, lead, which I think is a pithy way of saying that the prime minister hasn't done any of those things, and that Wes Streeting, he argues, would, were he the prime minister, which gets us back into this kind of shadow leadership contest, which has been underway for, you know, the best part of a month now. And of course, if Andy Burnham was to enter that leadership contest, first of all, he'd have to win the Makerfield by-election, which is in a week's time. He'd have to beat Robert Kenyon of Reform UK and the many other candidates who are standing in that by-election. And you can see a full list of them on the BBC News website, or listen to a previous episode of By-election Cast, where you can hear celebrity guests reading the whole list of candidates. And then, Chris, you managed to get Keir Starmer on the record saying something that his allies have let it be known a bit for the last few weeks. And I'm sure Keir Starmer himself has said personally to a lot of people, but hasn't said it to the nation, which is he will stand and fight if there is one of those leadership contests. Look, I'm not going to walk away. I don't think we should plunge the country into the chaos of a leadership election. But if that happens and you stand, wouldn't you be a contributor to that chaos? Well, I don't think it should happen. But if it does happen, I will fight. And let me just be clear with you, that's not about personal vanity. It's not about stubbornness. It's out of a very deep sense of duty. I was elected to serve this country, notwithstanding the difficult circumstances. That is what I am doing. And in the last few weeks, others have made their own case. I've been concentrating on the job I was elected to do, which is to deliver for this country. This is about a sense of service and duty. It's not vanity. It's not stubbornness. It's duty. So there's been a consistency to what he has said and his team have said going back months, even before Christmas, they were making that clear. But what's changed, as he has been saying that, are the circumstances. And clearly, the circumstances have sharpened in terms of the potential likelihood of exactly that scenario. In other words, a leadership contest. Now, there's a couple of things we should tease away at here. Things that those in high office will say when they're in high office are not always the same when the circumstance that they are imagining actually comes to pass. And I don't mean to imply any sense of cynicism there. It's just that if you are a political leader, the minute you publicly acknowledge some sort of potential limitation... The things you've got to say to be able to keep going. Completely. And the minute you imply a situation where you are entertaining the idea of you leaving, either voluntarily or otherwise, that instantly is weakening. However, so let's unpick a couple of things here. Firstly, in doing what he is doing and doing it as repeatedly as he has done it, he is putting the barrier to entry, the bar that any potential toppler has to clear as high as it'll go. He is emphasising over and over again, including in circumstances in which he has been in, frankly, trickier and trickier waters, that if another MP comes along and says, I've got 81 MPs, which is the clearance threshold for triggering a leadership contest, the Prime Minister is saying... Well, firstly, he's saying he won't, you know, there'll be no suggestion of him just walking away. No coronation. Exactly. But in that scenario, he would stand, including, as I put to him, a scenario where there is only one other contender. In other words, a scenario where if he chose not to stand, as leader of the party, he would be automatically on the ballot paper unless he chose not to be. If he chose not to stand, then there would be a coronation of a new Prime Minister and it would all happen very quickly. And I was really intrigued to ask him about this, Adam, because I've been interviewing the Prime Minister frequently for the last four or five years. And the thing he always comes back to is he hates the kind of soap opera of politics, and he hates the idea that there's been this kind of perma-chaos in politics. And of course, in that scenario, where he had a choice as to whether or not to stand, and in so doing would determine whether or not there was a contest, clearly there's an alternative scenario where there is more than one challenger to Keir Starmer. In other words, a contest is guaranteed. But in that scenario, he could choose to avoid a contest where, arguably, you'd be choosing to avoid the kind of rupture, chaos, whatever, of what would then follow. The counter-argument, of course, is that the Labour Party and the wider country would get a greater sense of what the wannabes were standing for. I'm just trying to think of historical precedents. So Margaret Thatcher fought the leadership challenge. Well, there was a leadership challenge before that. There was the stalking horse one that was never going to win. But then she fought the leadership challenge and only pulled out after the first round of votes showed that she hadn't won convincingly enough to stay in office. Now, of course, this is a different process for the Labour leadership contest. But yes. She fought. She didn't say, oh, you're challenging me, I'll go. No, no, completely. And of course, that points, obviously, as you say, the sort of contest rules are different and it's a different generation and all of that. But that points to a nuance where you can make it clear in advance that you're going to fight and you're going to stand and do, but not necessarily run the thing all the way through. And as I say, over and above the political imperative that there's certain things you do have to say whilst you're still in office, it's sort of binary. There is also the psychological thing. We saw this playing out in the Labour party after the elections last month, that it is one thing imagining in a scenario, which is quite another when that scenario is real, particularly because, again, in that circumstance, and again, we're into the hypotheticals here, but in that circumstance, you could get a response from the cabinet, for instance, that would leave a prime minister in a position where carrying on was untenable. So I'm not saying that will happen. I've no idea. Let's see. We're well into the who knows what's going to happen zone at the moment. Welcome to podcasting. Well, yeah, exactly. But I thought it was interesting that he was willing to sort of riff away at that scenario, because of course, they're thinking through all of these potential scenarios. And you talk about what prime ministers have to say in certain circumstances to carry on. And I just remember that famous interview you did with Liz Truss in her final week in office. None of us actually knew for certain at that point that it was her final week in office. It was on the Monday night. And you asked that classic question of will you fight the next election as the leader of your party? And she said yes, but with a massive pause before she said that. And that pause, you could argue, and I'm sure historians will say, sort of sealed her fate that week. So I was very intrigued to hear what the version Keir Starmer would come up with for that question. Not criticising you for doing an obvious question at all. It's like it's a good question. Well, in advance, just to show my workings when we were preparing this interview this morning, and we were kicking that around. It's not quite the same circumstance that the prime minister's in compared with Liz Truss. There's parallels, but her situation was more perilous. Maybe only a couple of days difference, but it was more perilous. And I thought, you know what? That is absolutely the question to repeat, because even though there is a standard answer, let's see how he responds to it. Well, yeah, because he didn't give the standard answer. No, he didn't. Let's listen. And you will lead Labour into the next general election? Well, that's what I want to do. I recognise that, you know, I've got to turn things around. We had a very bad set of elections. It wasn't quite a yes, though. So you're acknowledging the jeopardy you're in? I've been always clear that that's what I want to do. But look, I recognise that given where we are, I need to turn that around. That's what I want to do. And then you're a little come back there of like, well, that just proves how much jeopardy you're in. And you're basically saying to him, that's you acknowledging what we all know. Well, if we unpick that, I mean, there's a danger of doing too much almost psychoanalysis here. But if we unpick that, that's pointing to two scenarios, isn't it? Or three scenarios. One would be that he just stands down because circumstances mean that in the end, that is the course of action he takes. Number two is that he fights a leadership election and loses. Number three is he fights a leadership election or there isn't a leadership election. And for whatever reason, he carries on. But at some point before the general election, he stands down. And yeah, as I say, we're going to end up. But I think there's a reason a question like that, I think is always worth asking, is that you arrive at variations on circumstances where answering with a straight yes has limited plausibility. And when I put it to Liz Truss, she tacitly acknowledged that that wasn't going to happen, even though she said yes. I think she resigned 48 hours later, 72 hours later, or said she would soon be leaving. And yeah, the prime minister acknowledging the acknowledging the jeopardy. And that's the tightrope that they have to walk. You know, you don't want to look so otherworldly that you are giving the impression that you have no idea what is going on beyond the walls of the building that you're in, in terms of your predicament, whilst at the same time not saying something that is instantly further undermining of the situation that you're in. But also is a bit different from a couple of weekends ago when when Starmer did an interview where he said he wanted to lead for 10 years and then lots of his critics said that shows you completely out of touch with the jeopardy you're in, to use the word that you used with him. And actually, he's given a much more nuanced, kind of more humble, human answer today. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think he'd chosen to absolutely, and maybe this helps with the longer interview, engage with the substance of the question as opposed to, which I think didn't help him in that interview he did with Rachel Sylvester of The Observer, I think, if I recall rightly, immediately after the local and devolved elections, where he used the formulation he's used a lot about a decade of national renewal, which immediately points to 10 years. At just the point that some in the party are wondering if it'd last 10 weeks or even 10 days. So yeah, maybe there was a bit of that as well. Right. We've talked about the interview for probably actually longer than the interview itself was, which tells you something about the media in 2026. Anything else you'd like to add that we've not covered? Well, I would say, I mean, as ever, newscaster, you've used stamina to get this far. But I would really encourage, I've been trying to say this to various bits of BBC output, that it's much better to listen to the whole interview than listen to me talking about it. So if you, you know, if you've got a long dog walk, actually not a long dog walk, 20 minutes. Or you're milking the cows, as we were discussing the other day. It's perfect soundtrack to milking the cows or taking the bins out a few times. Depends how long your driveway is. It takes 22 minutes to get there. Doing the hoovering or whatever. I would be delighted to be your company. Did you discuss the football with them? I did, actually. I did because we did a little thing for our TV piece where the two of us walked up the famous stairwell in Downing Street, past all the pictures of previous prime ministers. And we actually did that after the interview. And it's always a bit, despite all the hours I've spent on television, I always find that a bit sort of, I'm not a good actor. And you're walking up a stairwell, you're with the prime minister, you're in their house and you're being filmed. I mean, there's nothing remotely natural about that. And also it's not the interview. You're just having a chat. And so I mentioned, because he's going to the G7 Summit in the south of France next week, and I'm going along as part of the press pack, that the first England game is on the Wednesday night as we come back. But I was also mentioning that, you know, obviously the whole thing had just started and my son had started filling in his ball chart this morning and all that kind of thing. And I know that he's a massive football fan. So yeah, we had a bit of a chat about the World Cup on the way up the stairs. Chris, thank you very much. And as Chris said, his full 22 minute-ish chat I keep saying 22 minutes. Is it 22? I think it is. I mean, it goes by in a flash, is available on the newscast feed. So if you go back one episode, you will be able to listen to the whole thing. Chris, have a good weekend. And you too. Cheers. And that's all. And Laura and Co will be back for more newscasts over the weekend. Bye-bye.