Keir Starmer is weak and failed to show leadership over Labour splits on Gaza ceasefire

Senior Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi has accused Keir Starmer of making “a hash” of Labour’s response to the Israel-Gaza conflict and failing to show leadership amid splits in his party.

Baroness Warsi, who became Britain’s first Muslim to attend Cabinet, told i she has been advising Labour and Conservative politicians outraged by events in Gaza not to resign but to fight for change from within.

She quit David Cameron’s government almost a decade ago over its handling of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict.

“I have had so many parliamentarians from all political parties who have rang up and said, ‘I’m going to resign, I know how you felt’. I’m urging them ‘Don’t do as I did, do as I say. These are different times. You have to stay to influence and fight for change,’” she tells i.

“Certainly if you look at the Labour Party, Keir [Starmer] is so weakened now, my view is why would you resign if you can just say what you believe without getting sacked.”

Sir Keir has “made a hash” of his response and failed to show leadership. “It’s whatever the government say, I’ll say yes to that. He now looks incredibly weak because people are literally coming out and saying ‘Well that might be the leader’s view but it’s not our view’. He’s not only not taken a principled position, he’s undermined his own leadership.”

The Conservative peer says she understands that the Labour leader is operating in the context of Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to root out antisemitism but says that her own party’s history of Islamophobia hasn’t caused it to “overcompensate” in the other direction.

Baroness Warsi doesn’t regret her own resignation. She said she had become “tormented” by having to pretend the government was taking steps to reduce the killing in Gaza while knowing it was sitting on its hands.

Her warnings at the time of the folly of seeking to accommodate Benjamin Netanyahu have proven correct, she says. “My argument in the 2014 war was that this was our moment to use our political capital. Why do we give the Israeli government unconditional support and in giving them credibility so undermine the chance of ever having peace? This time I think it is far worse.

“All of the things I was warning about in my resignation letter we are seeing. You can bomb and bomb and bomb Palestine – and Israel has been for decades and decades. It doesn’t achieve any more security. After all of that bombing and occupation we still have the worst killing of Jews in Israel – it hasn’t worked. The securitisation and occupation hasn’t worked. We have to try something else.”

“When we say we stand for Israel, which Israel is that? The liberal, decent, human-rights-loving, anti-Netanyahu Israel? I stand for that Israel but if we are standing for a prime minister who is mired in allegations of corruption who has a self-confessed fascist in his government, a security minister who has a conviction for terrorism and racial hatred, is that the Israel we stand for? I don’t think so.”

Of the Hamas attacks on October 7 she says: “Oh my God what a horrific thing. My first instinct was family. I spent that whole weekend with my kids – the unimaginable pain of losing a child and a parent.” Baroness Warsi says she has been involved in efforts to free hostages taken by Hamas and is “shocked” that they are not being given a higher priority by Netanyahu.

When asked about the quality of political and media debate that has often concentrated on the meaning of certain words or phrases rather than the substance of the conflict, her voice cracks with emotion.

“Lets not have the semantics, what we are saying is ‘stop killing each other’ that’s it. I’m sick of it, in all this semantics people are dying. We are talking about kids. I have had moments in the last two weeks where I have just despaired that we are stood on the sidelines whilst children are being killed. This war has killed more children in the last two weeks than children have been killed in war for something like the last five years. I don’t care if that child is Israeli or Palestinian, political leadership is required to say, ‘Enough’. The international rules based system was built to stop things like this.”

If she is critical of the Labour leader, the woman who introduced Cameron to the Conservative Party conference in 2005 for his leadership-election-winning speech is, if anything, even more hostile to Rishi Sunak’s government.

She says the Tories are in danger of following the US Republicans into a world in which ‘you can talk all sorts of rubbish and not back it up with evidence’. “We are presiding over a period in which public finances aren’t under control and things don’t work. How did we become the party that broke Britain?”

“Oh God no!” she says about the option of joining Labour. “I couldn’t be in the Labour Party, that’s what breaks my heart. I feel like I’m in this toxic abusive relationship and yet somehow I keep hoping that they’ll change. I want us to come back into the centreground where we are serious, thoughtful, sensible people.”

She says she has been encouraged by Jewish friends to keep speaking out against what she sees as the effort to turn events in the Middle East into another battle in the culture war but her driving motivation is for her own children.

“I refuse to accept that this will not be a place for my kids and grandkids,” she says. “My grandads both served in the British Army, my great uncle served, two of them were taken prisoners of war, they came over to this country in the 1950s and broke their backs in the mills, I served my country at the cabinet table and every day I have to listen to bullshit about loyalty and about belonging.”