Tag: Donald Trump

With Starmer finished, we need a proper conversation about what ‘change’ looks like

Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street

It’s cruel to call it another U-turn. But growing speculation about Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation, days after insisting he wouldn’t walk away from Number 10, feels fitting.

Last week, the Prime Minister pledged to fight any challenger to his role. Steadfast, if weary, interviews like the one below pointed to progress on growth and NHS waiting lists. This progress doesn’t seem to cut through to the wider public though.

Andy Burnham’s resounding win in the Makerfield by-election changed the tone, gradually then suddenly.

Talk of fighting on is fading, with ministers saying yesterday that the Prime Minister is reflecting on his position. Today, in the face of mounting pressure and fighting back tears, he resigned. *

So here we are, less than two years after storming into office, facing the prospect of a SEVENTH Prime Minister in a decade. His promise to businesses in Bristol to end the psychodrama that defined politics over that period feels like a speck in the distance.

It’s desperately sad that it’s come to this. And it highlights to me a collective madness that passes for public discourse about politics in this country, fuelled largely by bad actors.

‘I wish him well,’ said Donald Trump casually overlooking the fact that net migration into the UK is falling under Labour.

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The collaboration challenge: how places can keep moving through chaos

Chaos images - front cover of Spectator and Economist magazine.

A fast start to the year makes it important to find time to make sense of events and what they mean for us.

Headlines scream chaos at us. Donald Trump’s statements this week alone – on Greenland, threats of increased tariffs, slurs against NATO troops and peace boards with Putin – are enough to make the head spin. And maybe that’s the point.

We can’t know what this means for the global economy, security and the values that many world leaders seemed to share until recently.

Canadian PM Mark Carney’s incredible speech at Davos highlights a ‘rupture’ in these values. His call to other ‘middle countries’ to become beacons in ‘a world that’s at sea’ resonates. Canada’s response to Trump’s aggression – on taxes, investment, defence spending, and closer partnerships with Europe – seem hugely impressive set against the trivia served up here.

Could it be a defining moment? If you have 15 minutes, I’d recommend watching it.

The rupture Carney speaks of has been a long time in coming. Now it’s here, addressing it feels like the biggest collaboration challenge of my lifetime.

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Building trust takes more than soundbites

I’ve thought fitfully about relationships and how they shape our views during this grinding start to the year.

They keep families, teams, political organisations and communities of interest together. They’re imperfect, occasionaly fractious and sometimes maddening. But we would not be ourselves without them.

Connections and shared experiences that make life worth living have festered on the backburner since March last year. No amount of Zoom catch ups can fill the void this creates in our lives.

This is the context to my becoming more anxious with feelings that, for all the benefits that technology brings, people aren’t connecting with others who hold different views to theirs.

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