Is it time to send 007 to Washington to serve as the new British ambassador? Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Financial Times, mooted this possibility to me in mid-December as we enjoyed lunch at Sweetings, a restaurant dating to the Victorian era located near his newspaper’s offices in the London City district. It looked like the kind of establishment that James Bond might patronize. “Daniel Craig,” he mused, “might be able to deal effectively with Donald Trump while his No. 2 could do the actual work of running the embassy itself.”
Whether Craig himself is keen to enter the world of high politics is an open question, but Rachman’s proposal struck me as a swell idea. Craig himself has previously suggested that he sees Bond as something of a selfless public servant. Anyway, in a Trump administration stocked with Fox News personalities, it could hardly hurt to send a bona fide celebrity to the capital of the free world. Indeed, a little pomp and circumstance is probably a good thing: Trump, who has nominated the banker Warren Stephens to serve as ambassador to the Court of St. James, likely takes a dim view of Starmer’s left-of-center government (during the presidential election Starmer dispatched almost 100 hundred staff members to assist the Harris campaign).
As it happened, I was on my own mission to London. In July, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer was elected prime minister in an overwhelming landslide with a majority of 174 seats after several decades of Tory rule. Britain has been upended politically.
Labour stormed to victory less because voters were enamored of its political program than out of disquiet and exhaustion with the conservatives who had run through a variety of prime ministers within months of each other toward the end of their reign. So where is the country headed? Can Labour retain its hold or will the conservatives come storming back?
After a rousing start, Starmer dropped precipitously in the new Opinium poll to less than former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at minus 38 percent—a 45 percent tumble. He is now being described as the most unpopular prime minister in the modern history of the United Kingdom. If Labour ever had a honeymoon, it has come to an abrupt terminus.
Several factors account for Starmer’s troubles. One is the concern with immigration, highlighted by the heinous Southport mass stabbing in late July that killed three small girls. The alleged perpetrator was the child of immigrants who, though not Muslim, had an al-Qa’ida manual in his possession. Anti-Muslim riots erupted. Freddy Gray, the deputy editor of the London Spectator, told me that British elites had underestimated the anger percolating among Britons over Southport while outsiders such as Trump had a better grasp of it. Many in the US and elsewhere point with concern to the large pro-Hamas marches in Great Britain as well as the vandalizing of statues of British historical figures. Elon Musk has criticized the “disastrous British experiment with multi-culturalism.” Most recently, he attacked Starmer and referred to Great Britain as a “tyrannical police state.” He has been summoned to testify as part of a parliamentary inquiry.
A second factor is the economy. Household disposable income rose a paltry 0.3 percent between 2019 and 2024. Growth in the last two months has been anemic and the economy may be on the verge of a recession. Starmer has vowed to boost economic growth rapidly and reached out to the European Union to reach a post-Brexit accommodation with it. He is trying to renegotiate trading terms. But Starmer suffered a blow with the European Commission’s recent move to sue the United Kingdom over what it alleges is its failure to fulfill its obligations under the post-Brexit agreement to ensure freedom of movement. In addition, European negotiators are playing hardball, demanding that Great Britain adhere to European Court of Justice rulings in exchange for more favorable trading terms.
The downsides of exiting the European Union have become palpably obvious. David J. Steven, the proprietor of Data Conversion Systems, which is based in Cambridge, explained to me that goods that would have previously sailed through to the continent now require extensive paperwork and can be held up more than a week at border controls. Polls now indicate that the majority of Britons believe that the decision in the June 2016 referendum to exit the European Union was a mistake.
Less consensus exists on the domestic budget. Starmer has antagonized farmers with his proposals for the imposition of a punitive inheritance tax in his October budget. In October, more than 10,000 traveled to Westminster to decry the inheritance tax as a threat to the tradition of British family farming. In December, several hundred farmers drove tractors to Westminster to protest the imposition of a 20 percent tax on agricultural assets worth more than one million pounds. Previously, they had not been taxed at all.
With its colossal majority, Labour, as Gideon Rachman reminded me, is in no danger of ceding power any time soon. The conservatives themselves are divided in twain by the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which Elon Musk has supposedly pledged to donate $100 million in order to support its efforts to surpass the Tories. Both Musk and Farage deny the reports.
It is in Westminster where Farage holds court; often, I was told, at the Westminster pub. Just down the street are the Spectator’s spiffy oak-lined offices. Just a few doors down from the Spectator is the headquarters of a website called UnHerd, which seeks to combat, among other things, wokeness and cancel culture. UnHerd boasts two meeting places, a restaurant and a clubhouse upstairs from. There I met Michael Gove, the former Cabinet official under Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak who was recently named the editor of the Spectator, and Winston Marshall, a former rock star turned popular anti-woke podcaster.
Already conservatives are attempting to regroup after the Tory debacle this past July. How quickly they can recover is unclear, but they can take a quantum of solace from the Labour Party’s current struggles.
