Sir Keir Starmer opened the new year by insisting that the cost of living is by far his main priority.

He was then immediately overshadowed by Donald Trump’s decision to take over Venezuela, and threats that Greenland could be next. Unsurprisingly, the questions the Prime Minister faced at his first speech of 2026 were more about his “friend” in the White House than about the message he was trying to get across.

Still, the focus is a sensible one: the cost of living is the most important issue with voters, ahead even of immigration and the NHS, and it was the feeling that people’s lives had gone backwards which made Tory defeat at the last general election inevitable.

Talking about living standards will certainly be more fruitful for Labour than infighting about the leadership, or freaking out over the sort of irrelevant quasi-scandals that grip Westminster most of the time. There is one........

© iNews