Keir Starmer's 100 days in office: chaos and misery

Keir Starmer has achieved 100 days in office. The bumbling and grasping prime minister needs a guiding mission

Keir Starmer celebrating election win
(Image credit: Getty Images/Justin Tallis)

Keir Starmer was handed one of the largest parliamentary majorities in history, yet has contrived to make a complete “hash” of his first 100 days in office, says Daniel Johnson in The Telegraph. The resignation last week of his chief of staff, Sue Gray, is just the latest of an “almost unprecedented catalogue of misfortunes, almost all of them self-inflicted”. “Keir Scrounger, as he deserves to be known, is not only guilty of misconduct” by accepting freebies from Labour donor Waheed Alli, but has also “bungled almost everything he has touched in his first three months”. 

As a result, no PM in modern history has “lost popularity so rapidly”. It’s unfortunate that, for the last few years, Starmer has chosen to “introduce himself to the British public” – from the other side of the dispatch box – as disapproving and superior, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. You have to be “whiter than white” if you are going to “make a career out of peering judgmentally” through your £294 Oliver Peoples glasses, and Starmer hasn’t been. “Which brings us to the other unfortunate conclusion”, as a poll places Labour’s lead over the Tories at just one point: the sense that Labour has squandered almost all of its electoral goodwill for a relatively “minuscule sum”. 

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.