PICTURE the scene: a gigantic image of Sir Keir Starmer’s face is beamed on to a digital billboard overlooking New York’s Times Square, one of the busiest places on the planet. And not one person seems to clock who he is. Establishing himself as a heavyweight on the world stage was the PM’s mission at the United Nations General Assembly in the city this week.
We live in dangerous times and our new Labour premier wants to be front and centre of the global response. “Britain is back” was his message. But, as he soon learned in the Big Apple , life isn’t always all yankee doodle when you reach the top of politics .
READ MORE ON KEIR STARMER In the hours before his portrait was projected on to the side of the Nasdaq building, the real Keir Starmer had taken yet another battering over the latest donor allegations. Hostile briefings The row over handouts of suits , glasses and frocks by his multi-millionaire pal Lord Alli — not to mention the loan of a luxury Covent Garden penthouse — has dogged him for weeks. But “Freebiegate” snowballed so much at this week’s Labour Conference that — by the time he took off from Liverpool airport on Tuesday evening, with a plane full of journalists — he must have wondered if he’d be stopped by customs at JFK and asked if he had anything to declare.
And it’s not just the Lord Alli scandal that has smothered his early premiership. Most read in The Sun Hostile briefings against his divisive chief of staff Sue Gr.
