Keir Starmer is very close to becoming the next Prime Minister of the UK with the election on Thursday, but already his commitment to the job is being called into question.
Why? Because he said that if he gets the job, he’d like to still spend Friday nights with his children.
The comments have sent conservatives into a spin, suggesting he’ll be a “part time prime minister” if he continues with his current routine of keeping the six hours after 6pm on a Friday night reserved for spending with his children.
The issue came up in an interview with Virgin Radio where Starmer described how he and his wife currently make it work.
The Labour leader has two teenage children with his wife Victoria Starmer, and says his children keep him “very, very grounded”. They help him relax and enable him to make better decisions, he says.
“We’ve had a strategy in place and we’ll try to keep to it, which is to carve out really protected time for the kids, so on a Friday – I’ve been doing this for years – I will not do a work-related thing after six o’clock, pretty well come what may,” he said.
He declared that there are “exceptions” that come up, but he’ll attempt to stick with the routine.
To be clear, while we’re yet to see Starmer’s Friday nights in action, his plans so far seem worlds apart from former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s disappear-to-Hawaii during a national crisis kind of situation.
Rather, Starmer has been upfront before getting elected about some boundaries he wants to reserve for his children — boundaries that he said he’ll maintain some flexibility around.
These boundaries wouldn’t make him a “part time prime minister”.
But in the desperate and final days of a miserable campaign for the Tories, that’s the line that’s being trotted out.
His rival and current UK prime minister Rishi Sunak declared that he hasn’t “finished at 6pm ever”. Well done, Rishi.
The Conservatives declared on X that the British public “deserve better than a part-time prime minister”.
Starmer has hit back, describing the comments as “really desperate”.
“They’re just in this negative, desperate loop,” he said on the campaign trail on Tuesday. “My family’s really important to me, as they will be to every single person watching this. And I just think it’s increasing desperate, bordering on hysterical now.”
Sunak was asked by journalists if criticising the Labour leader for his intention to carve out Friday nights was justified. Sunak responded that in his experience, “there is always work to do.”
You don’t need to be a prime minister to always have work on your plate. But taking on such a role clearly requires sacrifice such as not getting the guaranteed family holidays you once experienced. But declaring you want to take six hours after 6pm on a Friday night to spend with kids? That makes you human and relatable and certainly not a “part time prime minister”.