Starmer

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has emerged rattled but ultimately unscathed after a day and night of drama during which a key member of his Labour Party called for him to resign over revelations about a former ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Starmer has faced more than a week of mounting pressure since the release of the latest tranche of documents from the US Department of Justice relating to the criminal cases against the late sex offender. They revealed that Mandelson had maintained a close friendship with the disgraced financier even after Epstein had pleaded guilty to solicitation of sex with a minor and was jailed in 2008.

They include documents and emails that suggest Mandelson may have received payments from Epstein and passed sensitive information to him during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Since then, Starmer has admitted that he knew of the pair’s friendship when he appointed Mandelson as ambassador but said the peer had lied about the extent of it. The affair has caused outrage in parliament. Two key members of Starmer’s inner circle have resigned and a third is under pressure to go. On Monday, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar called for the prime minister to do the same.

While Starmer’s position has been shored up for now by a rally of support from his cabinet on Monday night, just how badly has this affair shaken his government?

Why did Anas Sarwar call for Starmer to resign?

Sarwar said at a news conference early on Monday afternoon that he had called Starmer and told him it was time for him to resign. “I spoke to the prime minister earlier today, and I think it’s safe to say he and I disagreed,” Sarwar said.

He said “too many mistakes” had been made in relation to the appointment of Mandelson.

“The distraction needs to end, and the leadership in Downing Street has to change,” Sarwar said as he became the first Labour heavyweight to stand against the prime minister.

While Sarwar said he believed Starmer to be a “decent man”, the fury over the Epstein files had severely damaged the government’s support and wrecked its chances in the upcoming Scottish parliament elections. Opinion polls put Scottish Labour some distance behind the Scottish National Party, followed by the far-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage.

But cabinet members came out in support of Starmer, ultimately ending the coup that never was. Angela Rayner, former deputy prime minister and a senior member of the Labour Party, was the first to show him support. She said in a post on X that while she did not defend Starmer’s judgement, “the worst possible response [to the scandal] would be to play party politics or factional games.”

“I urge all my colleagues to come together, remember our values and put them into practice as a team,” she wrote on X. “The Prime Minister has my full support in leading us to that end.”

Within hours, nearly every minister had followed suit. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, urged people to “give Keir a chance”. Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, said he hoped the prime minister would stay on, and Douglas Alexander, Scotland secretary, said he “respected” Sarwar’s stance but backed the prime minister.

On Monday night, Starmer addressed more than 400 MPs and peers at a Labour Party meeting. “I have won every fight I’ve ever been in. I fought to change the Labour Party to allow us to win an election again,” he told them.

“But I’ll tell you this, after having fought so hard for the chance to change our country, I’m not prepared to walk away from my mandate and my responsibility to my country or to plunge us into chaos as others have done.”

Who has resigned from Starmer’s team and why?

Two key figures have already resigned, and a third is under pressure to do so, UK media has reported.

Amid growing outrage over the new revelations about Mandelson and Epstein, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, resigned on Sunday, taking “full responsibility” for advising the prime minister to appoint Mandelson to the ambassadorship, which he took up in 2025, despite the risks.

“The decision to appoint Mandelson was wrong,” McSweeney said. “He has damaged our party. … I advised the prime minister to make that appointment and I take full responsibility for that.”

Mandelson was dismissed from the post in September after serving seven months after the UK daily The Sun obtained other emails between him and Epstein that showed the depth of their friendship.

After the release of the latest tranche of Epstein documents on January 30, Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party and the House of Lords.

Tim Allan, Starmer’s communications chief, resigned on Monday, saying he was leaving to pave the way for a “new No 10 team” to be built as Starmer tries to reset his government.

Allan, who founded the Portland Communications firm specialising in reputation management, had been in the job for only five months, and Starmer is now looking to hire his fifth communications chief since taking office in 2024.

Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary and senior-most civil servant in Downing Street, is also reportedly under pressure to resign and is said to be currently negotiating his exit from the role, which he has been in for less than a year.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported that some people close to Starmer view him as a “disastrous” appointment.

What did the Epstein files reveal about Mandelson?

The latest release of files showed Mandelson maintained his relationship with Epstein after the latter was jailed in 2008.

They also suggested Mandelson received payments from the late financier and may have shared market-sensitive information with him that was of financial interest to Epstein.

Leaks of sensitive information by Mandelson allegedly took place in 2009 while he was serving as the UK’s business secretary.

The UK police have launched a criminal investigation over suspected misconduct in public office linked to Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein.

In one of the emails revealed in the most recent tranche of documents released from the US Justice Department, Mandelson told Epstein to “fight for early release” shortly before he was sentenced in 2008.

“I think the world of you,” Mandelson told Epstein, adding about his prosecution: “I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain. You have to be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can.”

How damaging has this all been for Starmer?

Starmer has apologised publicly for appointing Mandelson as ambassador to the US despite knowing of his ties – but not the extent of them, he said – to the disgraced financier.

“None of us knew the depth and the darkness of that relationship,” Starmer said on Thursday as he apologised to Epstein’s victims.

“I am sorry – sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you, sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointing him.”

But this has not been enough to let him off the hook entirely, experts said.

Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the scandal has been hugely damaging for Starmer. “A more popular PM might have been able to ride it out, but he was already facing a good deal of hostility from voters before it blew up,” Bale told Al Jazeera. “He’s managed so far to hold on to his cabinet, but he’s completely lost the trust of the electorate – and that’s hard to get back.”

Bale said “people are disgusted by” Starmer’s decision to appoint Mandelson “despite knowing that he’d stayed friends with Epstein after he’d been convicted”.

Can Starmer’s leadership still be challenged?

While Starmer has survived Monday night, his position is still weak with low approval ratings, experts said.

Labour is expected to suffer losses in crucial Scottish elections in May. A parliamentary by-election is also due on February 26.

“The immediate danger [to Starmer] is that [Labour] suffers catastrophic losses in a by-election and then a big set of elections in May,” Bale said. “That will reignite calls for Starmer to resign and, if he doesn’t, a challenge from one or more of his colleagues.”

Among the top runners to replace Starmer are Rayner, his former deputy prime minister who resigned from the cabinet last year over a tax scandal.

A website pitching Rayner as leader, angelaforleader.co.uk, went live in January briefly, The Guardian newspaper reported. Rayner has denied any links to the website.

Another politician gearing up to replace Starmer is Wes Streeting, the health secretary.

Streeting, 43, has also been called out for his ties with Mandelson. In a bid to distance himself from the former ambassador, Streeting this week shared private chats he had with Mandelson that questioned the government’s growth plan.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, 45, is another possible successor to Starmer. She has grown popular among several right-aligned leaders of the Labour Party with her moves to tighten border controls and crack down on unauthorised immigration.

What other issues has Labour faced under Starmer?

The Labour Party swept to power in July 2024, ending nearly 14 years of Conservative rule. However, the prime minister has since had a difficult time in Downing Street.

In the 2024 elections, Reform UK, the right-wing, populist, anti-immigration party led by Farage, won just five of the 650 seats in parliament. However, it has gone on to become one of the best polling British parties. In July, a YouGov poll put Reform in the lead, predicting it could win 271 seats if elections were held then.

In his speech on Monday, Starmer called the challenge posed by the rise of the Reform party, which has won over a number of high-profile defectors from the Conservative Party in recent weeks, “a fight for our lives”.

Starmer is also facing domestic pressure to put a stop to undocumented immigration to the UK. More than 32,000 people tried to cross the English Channel from France in small boats last year. These crossings are dangerous and have resulted in many deaths.

The UK and France have laid the blame on each other for the rising numbers. This led to a “one-in-one-out” migrant deal signed between the UK and France last year, under which the UK returns one migrant to France for each accepted refugee. The scheme has had little success, however, with only a handful of migrants returned.

Starmer himself has dropped in popularity by 20 percentage points from July 2024 to January this year, according to YouGov.

“Reform has obviously spooked some in the Labour Party,” Bale said, adding, however, that Reform is eating into the Conservatives’ base more. “And Labour probably needs to worry more about the Greens and the Liberal Democrats at this stage.”

“The break-up of the two-party duopoly that has dominated British politics for a century is no longer simply an aspiration among challenger parties but an ongoing reality,” Bale said.

Despite calling it earlier an ‘act of great stupidity’, Trump signals support of Starmer’s Chagos deal.

United States President Donald Trump appears to have endorsed the deal struck by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to hand over the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, weeks after calling it a “great stupidity”.

Trump had last month described the United Kingdom’s decision to cede sovereignty of the Indian Ocean archipelago, which includes a joint US-UK military base on the island of Diego Garcia, as an “act of great stupidity”.

The US president said he held productive talks with Starmer on Thursday and that the UK leader had made the “best deal he could make”.

But he also warned in a post on Truth Social that the US would retain the right to “militarily secure and reinforce” the US presence on the island of Diego Garcia if it were threatened.

The British government said in a statement that “the leaders agreed their governments would continue working closely to guarantee the future operation of the base and speak again soon”, the AFP news agency reported.

Under a deal agreed last May, the governments of the UK and Mauritius jointly announced that full sovereignty of the Chagos, a remote group of more than 60 islands, would again belong to Mauritius in exchange for guarantees that the US military base could continue operating there for the next 99 years.

Last year’s announcement stirred a range of emotions among the Chagossians, who were forced from their island home in the 1960s and 1970s and resettled in Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK. For decades, they have campaigned to return to their ancestral lands freely, without any restrictions.

The Chagos Islands have been under British control since 1814. In the 1960s and 1970s, Britain forcibly evicted nearly 2,000 locals to make way for the US military base, which played a pivotal role in US military operations in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, the US also acknowledged that the base had been used for covert rendition flights of “terrorism” suspects.

Directly addressing Epstein’s victims, he said: “I am sorry, sorry for what was done to you, sorry that so many people with power failed you. Sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed him and sorry that even now you’re forced to watch this story unfold in public once again.”

Starmer says Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should testify before US Congress about his past dealings with the late convicted sex offender.

The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer has suggested that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, a former prince, should cooperate with authorities in the United States investigating the Jeffrey Epstein files and activities.

Speaking on Saturday to reporters at the end of a visit to Japan, Starmer said, “Anybody who has got information should be prepared to share that information in whatever form they are asked to do that.”

“You can’t be victim-centred if you’re not prepared to do that,” he added, according to remarks carried by Sky News. “Epstein’s victims have to be the first priority.”

Asked whether Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles III, should issue an apology, Starmer said the matter was “for Andrew” to decide.

His comments came as the US Justice Department said it would be releasing more than three million pages of documents along with more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images under a law intended to reveal most of the material it had collected during two decades of investigations involving the wealthy financier, who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The disclosures have revived questions about whether the former British prince, who was stripped of his title last year over his friendship with Epstein, should cooperate with the US authorities in their investigation.

Mountbatten-Windsor – who has long denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein – has so far ignored a request from members of the US House Oversight Committee for a “transcribed interview” about his “longstanding friendship” with the billionaire.

The files have also prompted the resignation of Slovak official Miroslav Lajcak, who once had a yearlong term as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

Lajcak was not accused of wrongdoing but left his position after emails showed that Epstein had invited him to dinner and other meetings in 2018.

The newly released files also show Epstein’s email correspondence with Steve Bannon, one-time adviser to US President Donald Trump; New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and other prominent contacts in political, business and philanthropic circles, such as billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

The files show a March 2018 email from Epstein’s office to former Obama White House general counsel Kathy Ruemmler, inviting her to a get-together with Epstein, Lajcak and Bannon. Lajcak said his contacts with Epstein were part of his diplomatic duties.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice is facing criticism over how it handled the latest disclosure.

One group of Epstein accusers said in a statement that the new documents made it too easy to identify those he abused, but not those who might have been involved in Epstein’s criminal activity.

“As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinised, and retraumatised while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy,” it said.

Jan. 29 (UPI) — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer emerged from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday to pronounce that ties between the two countries were back on track, with progress made on trade, tourism and business travel and disrupting illegal migration.

Speaking to reporters after his 80-minute meeting with Xi in the Great Hall of the People, the first by any British leader in eight years, Starmer said it was “very good, productive session with concrete outcomes” that represented a substantive advance.

“It was a real strengthening of the relationship and that’s in the national interest because, of course, there are huge opportunities here in China. A lot of the discussion was about how we open up access for those opportunities, focusing, as I always do, on how this is going to be delivered back in the United Kingdom, how does it benefit people back at home,” he said.

Starmer said headway had been made on Scottish whisky tariffs, visa-free travel to China for Britons and a border security deal on deporting illegal immigrants from Britain, tackling Chinese gangs producing synthetic opioids, and cutting off the flow of Chinese-made marine engines used by people smugglers moving migrants across the English Channel in small boats.

Starmer’s meeting with Xi ran for more than double the period of time scheduled for the talks.

Downing Street later confirmed British citizens would be permitted visits for tourism or business purposes of up to 30 days without a visa.

On issues where they did not see eye to eye, the two sides agreed to “maintain frank and open dialogue,” according to the readout from No. 10.

Starmer insisted he raised human rights at the meeting, including the treatment of the Uyghur minority in China and media mogul and democracy activist Jimmy Lai, a British citizen who has been in prison in Hong Kong since 2020 on sedition and other charges.

He said they had a “respectful discussion” and that his Chinese hosts had listened, with Starmer pointing out that the opportunity to raise “issues we disagree on” was part of the rationale for engagement.

Praising the contributions of past Labour governments to building Sino-British ties, Xi said that China stood ready to move beyond the “twist and turns” to develop a “long-term relationship” with Britain and “consistent, comprehensive, strategic partnership” that would benefit both peoples and the wider world.

However, no major deal or breakthrough came out of the meeting with the only agreement thus far a $20.7 billion investment in China through 2030 by U.K. pharma-giant AstraZeneca to expand its Chinese operation, particularly its work on anti-cancer cell therapy.

The Conservatives’ shadow national security minister, Alicia Kearns, who had urged Starmer to make the release of Lai and the lifting of sanctions on British MPs a condition of his visit, doubled down on her criticism.

“Keir Starmer’s visit tells the Chinese Communist Party they can carry on just as they are,” she wrote on X.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer is on a three-day state visit to China as he seeks to deepen economic and security ties with the world’s second-largest economy after years of acrimonious relations.

This is the first trip by a UK prime minister to China since Theresa May met Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2018.

Here’s what you need to know about the trip aimed at mending ties at a time of global uncertainties:

What’s on Starmer’s agenda for China?

The UK PM met Xi and Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing on Thursday. He will next head to Shanghai to meet British and Chinese business leaders, according to his official itinerary.

After their meeting on Thursday, Starmer and Xi called for a “comprehensive strategic partnership” between the two nations.

“China-UK relations experienced setbacks in previous years, which were not in the interests of either country,” Xi said. “In the current complex and ever-changing international situation … China and the UK need to strengthen dialogue and cooperation to maintain world peace and stability.”

In his opening remarks, Starmer told Xi the two nations should “work together on issues like climate change, global stability during challenging times”.

The prime minister is accompanied by a delegation of nearly 60 representatives of businesses and cultural organisations, including banking conglomerate HSBC, pharmaceutical giant GSK, carmaker Jaguar Land Rover and the UK’s National Theatre.

Starmer told Bloomberg there will be “significant opportunities” for UK businesses in China in an interview this week in the run-up to his trip.

His trip is also expected to mark a reset in UK-China relations, which have been strained in recent years. Starmer underlined his intentions during his meeting with Xi on Thursday.

“China is a vital player on the global stage, and it’s vital that we build a more sophisticated relationship where we can identify opportunities to collaborate, but of course, also allow a meaningful dialogue on areas where we disagree,” Starmer told Xi, according to the Reuters news agency.

Why does the UK want to reset its relationship with China?

Starmer has framed his trip to China as a pragmatic move despite ongoing concerns back home about Beijing’s human rights record and potential national security threat.

“Like it or not, China matters for the UK,” Starmer said in advance of his trip to Beijing.

“As one of the world’s biggest economic players, a strategic and consistent relationship with them is firmly in our national interest. That does not mean turning a blind eye to the challenges they pose – but engaging even where we disagree,” he said.

China has rejected the allegations of human rights violations in parts of the country.

While few details have been released yet, Jing Gu, a political economist research fellow at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies, said reviving economic ties would require expanded “market access, predictable regulation and fair treatment of UK firms” alongside clear “guardrails”.

“This is not a question of being ‘pro-China’ or ‘anti-China’,” she said in a statement.

China offers a potential economic lifeline to the UK, whose economy has struggled in the decade since it embarked on its departure from the European Union in 2016.

A report by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States estimated last year that Brexit reduced UK gross domestic product (GDP) by 6 to 8 percent, with the impact accumulating gradually over time. Investment is also down 12 to 18 percent, according to NBER estimates, and employment is down 3 to 4 percent.

The UK’s GDP is estimated to grow 1.4 percent in 2026, according to Goldman Sachs, as it faces new economic challenges from US President Donald Trump’s decisions and announcements.

The UK was not exempt from Trump’s tariff war despite its decades-long “special relationship” with the US. As a NATO member, the UK has also watched with alarm as Trump recently threatened to annex Greenland and impose up to 25 percent tariffs on any country that opposed him.

Starmer is not the only US ally looking to diversify economic ties. His trip to China follows in the footsteps of French President Emmanuel Macron, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

What strained the UK’s relationship with China?

The UK has longstanding concerns with China’s human rights record, but its relationship with Beijing took a turn for the worse after mass antigovernment protests swept Hong Kong, a former British colony, in 2019.

The UK was alarmed by the political crackdown that followed the 2019 protests and Beijing’s decision to impose legislation in 2020 that criminalised “secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security”.

In the aftermath, the UK opened a special immigration scheme for the citizens of Hong Kong born before the city’s 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty. British officials have continued to criticise Hong Kong’s national security trials, including the prosecution of pro-democracy businessman Jimmy Lai, who is a UK citizen.

Allegations of Chinese spying in the UK and China’s support for Russia in the Ukraine war have also frayed the ties.

Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London, told Al Jazeera that he did not expect any concessions in this area during Starmer’s visit. “Beijing will work to support Starmer to present the visit as a success, but it will not make any concession in areas that matter to China, such as human rights,” he said.

What about security concerns?

Concerns about Chinese spying have been a front-page issue in the UK over the past year, with the head of the domestic intelligence agency MI5 recently saying “Chinese state actors” pose a national security threat “every day”.

Despite these worries, Starmer’s government this month approved Beijing’s plan to open a “mega embassy” in London that critics say could become a hub for espionage in Europe.

The embassy’s approval also follows the collapse of a legal case against two British men charged with spying for China. The decision by prosecutors to withdraw charges at the eleventh hour remains highly controversial in the UK.

China has denied the spying claims, with its Ministry of Foreign Affairs calling them “unfounded” accusations.

Starmer’s trip, however, emphasised areas of potential security cooperation between China and the UK.

Following his meeting with Xi, the Prime Minister’s Office announced that law enforcement would cooperate with Chinese authorities to stem the flow of synthetic opioids into the UK and cut off the supply of small boat engines to criminal gangs.

Engine-powered boats are used to smuggle people across the English Channel, according to Starmer’s office.

The agreement will include “intelligence sharing to identify smugglers’ supply routes and direct engagement with Chinese manufacturers to prevent legitimate businesses being exploited by organised crime”, his office said.

British PM Keir Starmer’s China visit is the first by a UK leader in eight years and marks a thaw in frosty relations.

The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer has met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in the first trip of its kind by a British leader in eight years.

Starmer said before his trip that doing business with China was the pragmatic choice and it was time for a “mature” relationship with the world’s second-largest economy.

“I have long been clear that the UK and China need a long-term, consistent and comprehensive strategic partnership,” Starmer said on Thursday.

During their meeting, Starmer told Xi that he hopes the two leaders can “identify opportunities to collaborate, but also allow a meaningful dialogue on areas where we disagree”.

Xi stressed the need for more “dialogue and cooperation” amid a “complex and intertwined” international situation.

The meeting between the two leaders in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Thursday was due to last about 40 minutes, and will be followed by another meeting between Starmer and Chinese Premier Li Qiang later in the day.

Starmer is in China for three days and is accompanied by a delegation representing nearly 50 UK businesses and cultural organisations, including HSBC, British Airways, AstraZeneca and GSK.

The last trip by a UK prime minister was in 2018, when Theresa May visited Beijing.

Strengthening economic and security cooperation was at the top of the agenda during the Xi-Starmer meeting, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Katrina Yu.

“[Starmer] has the very big task of bringing this diplomatic relationship out of years of deep freeze, so the focus when he talks to Xi Jinping will be finding areas of common ground,” Yu said from Beijing.

China was the UK’s fourth-largest trading partner in 2025, with bilateral trade worth $137bn, according to UK government data.

Starmer is seeking to deepen those ties with Xi despite criticism at home around China’s human rights record and its status as a potential national security threat.

Besides business dealings, Starmer and Xi are also expected to announce further cooperation in the area of law enforcement to reduce the trafficking of undocumented immigrants into the UK by criminal gangs.

Relations between the UK and China have been frosty since Beijing launched a political crackdown in Hong Kong, a former British colony, following months of antigovernment protests in 2019.

London has also criticised the prosecution in Hong Kong of the pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who is also a British citizen, on national security charges.

Starmer’s trip to China comes as both Beijing and London’s relationship with the United States is under strain from President Donald Trump’s tariff war.

Trump’s recent threats to annex Greenland have also raised alarm among NATO members, including the UK.