Off on another foreign trip, PM? Isn’t it time to come home... and stay put?

You cannot win in politics. When Rishi Sunak became prime minister, he thought it was more important to stay at his desk, working on the people’s priorities, than to waste time taking a plane to Sharm el-Sheikh and back for a photo opportunity with world leaders at Cop27.

Except that there was such an outcry about his refusal to save the planet that he sheepishly got on the plane anyway, and flew a 5,000-mile round trip to the climate summit.

When Keir Starmer became prime minister in July, he was off to Washington on day five for a Nato summit, and then to Berlin and Paris before the end of the month. Eyebrows were raised among former ministers, and questions were asked about whether he had allowed officials to capture his diary.

After a pause in August, Starmer’s foreign trips resumed: Berlin, Paris, Dublin, Washington, Rome, New York, Brussels, Berlin, Samoa, Budapest and, this week, Paris and Baku. Sky News calculated that he would be out of the country for 22 days out of 77.

The voters have started to notice. Luke Tryl, who runs focus groups for the More in Common campaign for the better understanding of politics, said on Monday: “‘Starmer always seems to be abroad’ has started coming up spontaneously in our focus groups.”

It was telling that the prime minister responded like a scalded cat. Instead of waving such findings aside as pretty irrelevant at this stage of a parliament, he responded to questions from journalists on the flight to the Cop29 summit in Azerbaijan by saying: “The key question for me is what am I spending my time on, wherever I am.”

At this point, the question of whether he is spending too much time out of the country intersected with another internal debate in No 10 about “sharpening” Labour’s five missions as set out in its manifesto. He went on: “The two key priorities for me, on all of these engagements with our partners, are our economy and economic growth, and border control and border security – they are the two dominant themes.”

What was striking was that neither of his priorities was climate change, the subject of the conference to which he was heading. Sunak was criticised for not going to Cop27; now Starmer was so sensitive about criticism for spending time on foreign trips that he claimed he was only going abroad to deliver for the folks back home – and didn’t even mention the green stuff.

When he got to Baku, the prime minister was keen to explain to the audience back home why he was there. “Britain must work with other countries to combat climate change,” he said. “This is why I have travelled to the Cop29 summit in Baku, to harness international cooperation in order to protect our country’s security and prosperity.”

There is a problem with that message, which is that Labour’s rhetoric of green electricity cutting household bills seems to be at odds with a policy that will add to bills in the short run.

That would be a problem whether Starmer went to Baku or not, but I wonder if he was beginning to regret his decision to attend. He could have ducked out easily enough given that other world leaders – Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz – weren’t there. But he had previously been persuaded that this was a chance for Britain to show leadership, including by announcing a new, more demanding target for cutting the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2035.

By the time he was on the plane, though, it seemed that he was more worried about economic growth and immigration.

Starmer once said that he preferred Davos to Westminster, but it seems we now have a prime minister who goes abroad only reluctantly, because it is the only way to secure the deals he needs to protect British living standards and Britain’s borders.