Keir Starmer Says Goodbye | BBC Newscast

Every Prime Minister knows when they take up the torch that the day will come when they have to pass it on. That day has come for me. This is the end of my political journey. Here's Starmer's final appearance in Parliament as Prime Minister. It was the final Prime Minister's Questions of the Starmer era. But what else is happening as he says goodbye? We will discuss on this episode of Newscast. Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast studio. And it's Alex in the Westminster studio. And it's Chris in a different studio, also in Westminster. So you're in different cupboards in the same office? That's it, yeah. But they're quite small cupboards, so it'd be a bit cosy if we were both in the same one. I think that's the logic of this. Yeah, it makes sense. And they're quite warm cupboards too, at least mine is. Yeah, this one is as well actually. How the sausage is made in a series of very small factories. Right, today's episode we're going to look at Keir Starmer's long goodbye as Prime Minister. Because we're recording on Wednesday just after lunch, so it's been Prime Minister's Questions. And that really felt, Chris, like the end of the Starmer era. But actually it was just the end of the Starmer parliamentary era. Because he is actually still Prime Minister until Monday. Yeah, and he'll still be an MP after that. So there's every likelihood we'll see him in Parliament after that. But certainly his parliamentary career as Prime Minister has now come to an end. I've rattled around at Westminster for probably longer than is healthy. On and off, mainly on for more than 20 years. And, you know, you remember these moments. I remember Tony Blair's final Prime Minister's Questions. That was particularly big given the longevity of his time in office at 10 years. But yeah, you know, you see that in these moments the kind of gears that Parliament has. You know, you couldn't have a PMQs like this every week. But Parliament can do sentiment and emotion and the human touch. And I think to an extent that was perhaps magnified this time round with the news of the last few days involving Ann Widdicombe. Because it's another thing that brings people across politics together. That shared sense of vulnerability, frankly. And her death, the murder investigation featured in the exchanges. But there was absolutely an undercurrent of sort of warmth and humour. Those who contribute towards the jokes and the punchlines, I think across the piece pretty much, had a pretty good week in terms of the lines that they drew up. And the lines were pretty well delivered as well. So, no, it was one of those ones that was a privilege to watch and witness. And here is Keir Starmer responding to a, obviously, comedy topical question about football from the Conservative MP, Graham Stewart, who compared the Prime Minister to Jude Bellingham. I think that's the first and certainly probably the last time I'll be compared to Jude Bellingham. But I thank him for that. And on the question of red cards, I can't tell him how much incoming I had a week ago Monday after President Trump intervened for their red card for me to get the England red card adjusted. Just for the record, Mr Speaker, I didn't attend. Alex, what about the exchange with the Leader of the Opposition, Cammy Badenoch? Yeah, just worth saying that wasn't the only football gag throughout the whole of PMQs. There were a fair few, as you might expect. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's always quite interesting what tone the opposition parties and also the Prime Minister choose to strike on a day like this, because it has differed if you look back at sort of final PMQs for previous leaders over recent years. But Cammy Badenoch today, I thought, I mean, she was her whole tone was quite gentle, I suppose, jovial. She was sort of there were lots and lots of jokes and gags in there. She didn't really kind of use the opportunity, as Leader of the Opposition often does, to attack the record of the Prime Minister, like you'd expect at a normal PMQs. And there was one kind of moment in it where right towards the end, her final question, when she knew it would be the last time that she faced Keir Starmer across the dispatch box in that format, that she just used that to pay tribute to his family. Because we know that when Keir Starmer left office or said he was going to leave office, in his speech in Downing Street, the thing that he became choked up and emotional about was when he spoke about his family and what they mean to him and the support they've given him. And I thought it was the fact that Cammy Badenoch used her last question to him to thank his family for the support that they've given the Prime Minister and recognise that actually, it's often the families of politicians that have to bear a lot of the brunt of the choices that their loved ones make by going into politics in the first place. So the whole tone from Cammy Badenoch, but also actually from Davey, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Richard Tice, Deputy Leader of Reform UK, stood up and posed a question. And the whole tone of it was not really like a normal PMQs in any way, shape or form. It was all very friendly, I suppose. And we can get a flavour of that exchange between Keir Starmer and Cammy Badenoch right now. This is my last exchange with the Right Honourable Gentleman. And I know how much his wife and children mean to him, and that they are in the gallery today. As everyone here knows, our families make a huge sacrifice for our choice to enter public life. So I hope he will allow me to draw our time together to a close by thanking them for the love and support they have given him throughout his time in office. Can I thank her very much for that? It is the last question I'll face from the Leader of the Opposition. And so let me wish her well and her family. We have had robust exchanges across this Dispatch Box. But she has extended kindness to me privately at very difficult times, including when there was an attempt to burn down our family home, which deeply affected my family. She reached out to me. And when my brother died of cancer, she reached out to me privately, not across this Dispatch Box. And I thank her for that and the tribute that she's just made to my wife and children, who mean the world to me. I do thank her for that. She knows this is robust and it has to be robust. And that's the way politics is done. But the kindnesses that sit behind it privately are often just as powerful, if not more powerful. And I thank her for that. And also, Chris, Keir Starmer refers to this a few times. People he has helped as Prime Minister were watching from the public gallery. Yeah, and I think this has been a theme actually much of the last week for the Prime Minister. So the wider context of the conversation that was dominating Westminster on Tuesday, the so-called Hillsborough law and some of the families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster in Westminster to see the Prime Minister were part of a gathering in the Downing Street garden that was seeking to champion and acknowledge those who the Prime Minister is proud to have helped in his time in government. And indeed, sometimes as his time as director of public prosecutions. And he was peppering his observations and his answers today with reference to people who were in the public gallery or in Parliament more widely listening and watching who he felt that he had been a help to, either as a constituency MP or as a Prime Minister. So, yeah, many of the answers circling back to one of those examples. And it's also just worth saying on that point, after PMQs, and it happened this week as it normally does, you have like what's called a little huddle with the Prime Minister's political team who try and impart a bit more information to journalists about whatever the government's up to. And there was a question in that huddle when the spokesperson for Keir Starmer was asked, you know, any plans for what Keir Starmer's going to do next? And that actually pointed to what he said in recent days when he's met campaigners against injustice. And he has said to those campaigners that he's going to continue fighting for them effectively from the back benches, which is where he'll now be. And it was interesting that his kind of political team pointed to that, not as a kind of definitive, and, you know, we don't know what Keir Starmer's going to get up to next, but clearly as one of his priorities is going to be, I think, to continue championing the causes of those people. So, yes, the Hillsborough families, but also people who've campaigned against violence against women and girls or knife crime or domestic violence. And those issues, it seems to be that he's going to attempt to keep them quite high up his own personal priority list when he departs Downing Street. The other thing I think worth acknowledging on a day like this, I was sitting in the press gallery looking down at the Prime Minister's political bench, which is where some of his advisors, not MPs, but advisors who work for him in Downing Street, sit. And plenty of them at the end were in tears. And it's a reminder that for those in this postcode who are drawn into this postcode, often with a deep-seated sense of pride in their party, and then often real human connection with perhaps a leader that they work for, that the nature of those jobs, working in Downing Street or working in so many jobs in politics, it is all consuming, but also driven by emotion. And when you reach a point like this, which for Keir Starmer is the end of the political road, it also is for those wider bunch of aides and advisors, who not only themselves are losing their jobs, but for whom their political project, if you like, that they've devoted their recent years to, is ending. So you see that in a very vivid and human and quite affecting way on days like this. I've seen it with parties of different political stripes. It's a really big moment for them. And there was tears amongst the parliamentarians too, particularly Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP, who asked the final question. And she's got a lot of history with Keir Starmer, because she was his first Parliamentary Private Secretary as Labour leader. So basically the person that helped him navigate Parliament in those first years or so in that job. And she teed him up for his final answer, which was this. Every Prime Minister knows when they take up the torch, that the day will come when they have to pass it on. That day has come for me. This is the end of my political journey. So the person who's receiving the torch, Andy Burnham, although he hasn't received it yet, wasn't there. He wasn't. I don't think we should be surprised by that. I think there'd be a sort of emotional recognition that it was Keir Starmer's day today. And obviously, to put it gently, a significant contributor to today coming about is Andy Burnham. And there is clearly, in that context, it's difficult. It's clearly difficult for the Prime Minister. So I think from Andy Burnham's perspective, even if he had been there and just sat in his seat, our gaze and the camera's gaze would have tilted towards him. There were several references to him during the course of the exchanges. So it didn't surprise me. And I can't think of anyone in that scenario, the scenario that Andy Burnham finds himself in, who would consider it a good idea to have been in Parliament today, given that this was a sort of warm, valedictory occasion for Keir Starmer, rather than the very different nature of how politics will look and feel, in terms of our storytelling on newscasts and elsewhere, at the end of this week and the beginning of next. It's remarkable, and this is true of many prime ministers, how quickly the mood shifts when a prime minister is outgoing. If you just think where we were, really just a matter of weeks ago, before Keir Starmer announced his resignation, and the mood in the Labour Party at that point was fraught, and it was angry, and it was frustrated, and it was spilling out in public. And some of the MPs who were sat on the backbenches today to be there to support Keir Starmer were the very ones that were calling for him to go. And then almost as soon as he announced he was going to step down, the whole mood in the Labour Party shifted. And they've been sort of attempting to present this very united front around Andy Burnham. And I think you just saw that really today kind of solidified in the way that the tone and the feel that was coming from the Labour benches, in that almost as soon as Keir Starmer said that he wasn't going to stay and fight or try and challenge any successor, that he was going to do this kind of exit, the whole mood in the Parliamentary Party towards him shifted. And it was on full display today, and it was kind of overwhelmingly a feeling of support coming from the Labour benches, as opposed to some of the other feelings that have, let's be honest, been on public display in the months leading up to this point. And I think it's not necessarily, certainly for all of those, just picking up on that point Alex, a contradiction, and I'm not suggesting you were saying it was, but it's not necessarily a contradiction to have wanted to see the Prime Minister go for the whole host of reasons that lots of Labour MPs would tell us privately and publicly, effectively amounting to them just thinking that he was a drain on their support. But then also, on a human level, feeling sorry for him, feeling conflicted at the drawbacks, as they might see, of going through a leadership change. And then also, as plenty of Labour MPs of every sort of instinct will say, that he dragged the party off the canvas after that big loss in 2019 and made them competitive again and won a general election. So it's one of those ones where, if you like, the tangle of emotions, the personal and the professional all sort of bubble out, really. Yeah, and I think also just a sense that you get from some in Labour, at this point of having reached this point, there's a bit of relief after what has been a really fraught and difficult run. And they are, I think, at this stage again, and we don't know what's going to happen in the next months and years, but they are at this stage, I think, feeling a little bit relieved that they are feeling at least very outwardly like a united party in a way that they weren't very recently. And Chris, just going back to something you said a minute ago about the actual government business that Keir Starmer is overseeing. So the Hillsborough Law, as it's known, which is this public accountability bill, which will basically give a duty to all public bodies to tell the truth and cooperate with any investigations when they're accused of getting something wrong, and will also introduce criminal penalties for people who run organisations in the public sector if they haven't been candid. That is an area where Andy Burnham has shown his face and actually talked about, and he was in Parliament on Tuesday night as this piece of legislation was going through its final phases in the House of Commons. Yeah, and what's fascinating about this is that you see the intersection, if you like, of two politicians who have made promises to the families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster. A prime minister in Keir Starmer who has, in recent years, led the Labour Party to its annual conference in Liverpool, which has been happening in Liverpool for the last handful of years, are on the trot, where promises have been made about delivering this Hillsborough Law, this duty of candour for public officials. The whole thing got bogged down, in particular around whether or not there should be exemptions for those in the security services. In the end, they've managed to find a way through that that acknowledges the particular nature of the security services work but does not exclude intelligence officers from the obligations of this law. Once it becomes a law, it's not a law quite yet. The prime minister clearly keen to deliver on his promise before he left office. And I got a sense of the human side of that when I was chatting to the daughter of a guy who died at Hillsborough who said to me, as she was going in to see the prime minister yesterday, that she was very sceptical when she first met him, she'd been let down by government after government, etc. But she was hugely personally warm to him because she said he had in the end kept his promise. And I think on a human level that really meant something to the prime minister. Yes, the Conservatives made the point that they felt the whole thing had been rushed because the prime minister wanted to get it done, certainly at the Commons level, before he left office. And then it's impossible not to point to the strength of Andy Burnham's politics being grounded in the Hillsborough disaster and his role as Culture Secretary back in 2009, addressing the annual service at Anfield, Liverpool's ground. That was the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, the work he did since then. And so Andy Burnham making his first Commons contribution since his return on this piece of legislation that means so much to him and so much to the guy who will soon be his predecessor. And Alex, another part of the Starmer legacy, this new, I was going to say clampdown, it's not really a clampdown on social media, new safeguards for teens on social media. We've got some more details of some new safeguards today. Yes, so one part of this would be a curfew so that from midnight to 6am you can't be on your phone and just endlessly scrolling through social media, the doom scroll and this kind of, some sort of mechanism, and I'll be honest, I don't fully understand it, but to limit the amount of those kind of particularly addictive videos that just get pumped through to your social media feeds. So that has been announced by government, but it's important to note there's quite an active conversation about how effective that may or may not be, with the government clearly suggesting that they think this is the right call, but others saying because you can opt out, basically that would be the default setting on your phone. These are for older teenagers, so 16, 17 year olds. They could opt out of it and just not have the curfew applied on their phone. So as with all of this, there's a pretty active debate around the effectiveness or not of it, whether it is the right approach, but it is interesting that what you're seeing, and again this is true of Prime Ministers of all colours when it comes to the point at which they leave office, they are trying to shape and build their legacy and they want to put in place things that they want to be remembered for, and I think that is undoubtedly a bit of what we're seeing from Number 10 this week. And Chris, in terms of Andy Burnham's personnel, it seems he's appointed three people as Chancellor, depending on which paper you read, but there's only one desk and one job. Well, this is it. Yeah, I mean, I think what's been quite interesting in the last couple of weeks with Andy Burnham is that broadly speaking, things have been very, very tight. You know, there hasn't been leaks. He's done very little in public. That Commons appearance stood out because there's been so few public appearances. He did one interview with Andrew Marr on LBC, which was relatively short, given the volume of questions there is for somebody who's days away from becoming Prime Minister. He's not taken any journalistic questions beyond that, as far as I'm aware of. And yeah, there hasn't been... There's a vast industry of kind of guesswork, frankly, about the Cabinet. Lots of people playing fantasy Cabinet. In fact, I was at one of the Westminster summer drinks parties the other night, and the fantasy Cabinet was the dominating conversation, in which lots of people were assembling plausible arguments for why person X might get job Y, but you could hear the equal and opposite from the next person you spoke to, delivered equally plausibly. The interesting thing here is the extent to which they have managed to keep things tight, or frankly, that they just haven't told many people anything yet. And I think it is more of the latter than the former. On the specific of Chancellor, the central question in his Cabinet assembly that Andy Burnham faces is, who does he make, the Chancellor? And part 1B of that question is, does he give the job to Ed Miliband? You know, is it Ed Miliband, or is it someone else? And the argument you hear from those who would like it to be Ed Miliband is that he knows the Treasury, he used to work there as an advisor, he knows how to run a government department, he knows his own mind and he can deliver, and that he's sympathetic to Andy Burnham's overall political agenda, and that he was really pivotal in saying to the Prime Minister pretty early on that he ought to stand down, etc, etc. Those who are sceptical say he's got far too many enemies, he lost the general election as Labour leader, he manages to have political opponents in the trade unions, as well as in the oil and gas sector, over his scepticism around expanding drilling in the North Sea, and he'll be a giant lightning rod because the papers that are sceptical towards Labour like to throw custard pies in his direction. So that's the essence of the argument that is raging at the moment, and Andy Burnham's got to come to a view in pretty short order. And as we depart this episode of Newscaster, we should talk about Keir Starmer's leaving present from the Cabinet, Alex, a carriage clock. One of those little posh clocks you put on your desk or mantelpiece. Yeah, and I think when the new... I can't remember who first reported this, but one of the news... Was it Patrick Maguire who first reported this? From the Times, I think, yeah. Anyway, one of the newspapers first reported this late on Tuesday night, that it was a carriage clock, and I think it was met with a little bit of mirth on social media because it is deemed to be a sort of the fairly traditional leaving present that you give. But actually it turns out... It's what people would get in 1976 arms. That's what I mean. It's just sort of... It's one of those leaving presents that has, in the past, been the punchline of many a joke. But it turns out that actually this was quite a thoughtful present for Keir Starmer because apparently his dad had a real fondness for clocks. So there was a sort of familial link there, something that felt quite personal to him. And we are told, by number 10, that it was a silver clock from around 1920, which was made by Dent, the British clockmaking firm responsible for building Big Ben, and included a plaque engraved with, change promised, change fought for, change delivered. Thank you, Keir, the cabinet. Must be quite a big clock. I mean, it must be. Or a small writing. Or maybe the plaque isn't on the clock. Maybe the plaque sits next to the clock. Oh yeah, good point. I'd not thought of that. I haven't got that level of detail to hand. I am just speculating. But yeah, we are told that the whole last cabinet meeting with Keir Starmer and his cabinet was, you know, a sort of fairly emotional affair, and that this was a very gratefully received present. And David Lammy, who's the Deputy Prime Minister, paid tribute to Keir Starmer in the final cabinet meeting and sort of spoke about his personal attributes and the stuff that he's done in politics. So yeah, I mean, I think that, again, it sort of speaks to the point that we were making earlier and that Chris quite rightly made, which is that there has just been this shift in mood. And I think that is kind of almost inevitable and that happens in politics. But the mood today is undoubtedly just really supportive of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister from all of the people that have worked alongside him. I think that's definitely what they're trying to get Alan across. The other thing on the clock, by the way, and I've heard this from several cabinet folk in the last couple of years, is that Keir Starmer is an absolute sort of bloke for timekeeping. He cannot stand people being late. And I think he reflected on that with a smile, not least because I think one or two cabinet ministers have found themselves on the wrong end of that when they might have turned up with a coffee in their hand 30 seconds late and not even realising they're 30 seconds late, but my goodness, the Prime Minister realised it. So I think that was an element of the warmth around the clock as well as that family connection to his dad. He also got two bottles of wine, one English sparkling and one Pinot Grigio. Pinot Grigio, is this 2006? We've just come forward 30 years from that carriage clock. Guys, all I'll say is, please don't get me a clock. Just vouchers will suffice. I reckon you've got one already. Have you got a carriage clock already, Adam? No, it doesn't really fit with the vibe of my flat. Does it not? You couldn't turn it down though. If we presented you with an engraved carriage clock, surely you'd put it pride of place. Flat match or not, no? We'll start a whip round, Alex, this afternoon. Also, I've now made it sound like I'm leaving. Oh yeah? No current plans. Right, Alex, thank you very much. Pleasure is ever. Chris, thanks to you too. Cheers.