Keir Starmer is getting ready to celebrate his first Christmas as PM, having secured one of the biggest election landslides less than six months ago.
But amid slumping poll numbers, a flurry of negative headlines, grim economic forecasts, millions calling for an early general election and even a parody song closing in on the festive Top 10, he could be forgiven for thinking the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future are visiting him all at once.
“Clearly it’s a pretty grim time to be prime minister at the mo,” said Sam Blewett in Politico’s London Playbook, but “Starmer’s hardly the first” British PM to “have a less-than-merry Christmas”.
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In past years, there have been “wars, invasions, natural disasters, international plots and dramatic resignations”, all helping “to spoil prime-ministerial Christmasses”, said Sue Cameron at Prospect.
Having refused to give Downing Street staff a week off over Christmas in 1941, Winston Churchill had to practise “what he’d preached” in 1944 and, following a community uprising in Athens, fly to Greece at 1am on Christmas morning, to negotiate a settlement.
In 1956, Anthony Eden, Churchill’s successor as Tory leader, “had one of the most miserable Christmasses of any Number 10 incumbent”, as the Suez crisis became “mired in deceit and failure”.
And Labour’s Jim Callaghan, in 1979, returned from a Christmas Caribbean summit to find the Winter of Discontent raging, sparking the famous “Crisis? What crisis?” headline, from which he never politically recovered.
Modern PMs have fared little better. In 1997, Tony Blair may have been basking in approval ratings Starmer can only dream of, but that did not stop protestors, angry at changes to disability benefits, derailing his first Christmas in Downing Street by throwing red paint over the gates and writing “Blair’s blood” on the ground.
Having finally made it to Number 10, Gordon Brown had a torrid series of Christmasses, facing fears of a recession in 2007, dealing with the collapse of the global financial system in 2008, and culminating in a 2009 end-of-year plot to oust him that splashed on the front page of the Daily Mail.
And the list goes on. Theresa May was “dealt a nightmare before Christmas” back in 2016, said Blewett in Politico. MPs voted for the government’s Brexit plan to be published before the UK invoked Article 50, leaving Parliament “irate”, voters “restless”, and even Queen Elizabeth “reportedly miffed”.
But few had it as bad as Boris Johnson, who spent Christmas 2020 holed up in Downing Street ordering mass lockdowns as the Covid pandemic raged. His nadir came at Christmas 2021, when the fun-loving PM “got a series of nasty surprises, all of them worse than a lump of coal”, The New Yorker reported at the time. These included the leaking of the now infamous clip of Downing Street staff joking about a lockdown-busting Christmas party – revelations that would, eventually, lead to Johnson’s downfall.
What next?
Downing Street has confirmed that Starmer will spend Christmas Day at the PM’s country retreat, Chequers, before heading off abroad for his first family holiday since the summer’s election.
Having cancelled his last planned getaway in August to deal with the fallout from the Southport riots, he will praying that the curse of Callaghan does not create another crisis that calls him back early – and ultimately dooms his premiership.
Having wished for a “better, brighter future” in his festive message to the nation, the PM “better have left one hell of a large inducement behind to encourage a miracle down one of Downing Street’s chimneys” because the papers are currently teeming with “reasons why the hard months gone by may give way to even harder ones to come”, said Politico.
Merry Christmas, indeed.
