S8 Ep346: SEGMENT 6: STARMER'S LEADERSHIP FAILURES AND CHINA EMBASSY CONCERNS Guest: Joseph Sternberg (London) Sternberg critiques Prime Minister Keir Starmer's struggling leadership and lack of clear direction for Britain. Discussion turns to Starmer's belated scr
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
SEGMENT 6: STARMER'S LEADERSHIP FAILURES AND CHINA EMBASSY CONCERNS Guest: Joseph Sternberg (London) Sternberg critiques Prime Minister Keir Starmer's struggling leadership and lack of clear direction for Britain. Discussion turns to Starmer's belated scrutiny of China's massive new London embassy complex, raising security concerns about the sprawling diplomatic compound and questions about why earlier governments permitted its construction without adequate review.
Transcript
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| 0:57.6 | I'm John Batchel with my colleague Joseph Sternberg, member at the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, who's living on an island. |
| 1:00.0 | It's called the United Kingdom. |
| 1:08.1 | And the leader of the government of that island, Mr. Starrmer, is speaking in two directions. One to the east, the Chagos Islands, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, |
| 1:13.3 | especially Diego Garcia, and to the west, Greenland, which isn't nearly as big as it looks on the |
| 1:18.8 | map. Island thinking, in addition to the fact, Mr. Stommer is in all kinds of trouble because of |
| 1:25.6 | unhappiness in his own party with his conduct most |
| 1:30.7 | recently. I can't tell Joe from this distance, is Starmer being bolstered by his defensive |
| 1:37.0 | Greenland and his transfer of the Chagos Islands? Or is this just weighing on his unhappiness? |
| 1:46.0 | Well, I think that a political problem, Kier-Starmer, has domestically in the United Kingdom, is that he's in that death spiral that politicians sometimes go into where they are so unpopular that nothing they can do will fix it. |
| 2:02.9 | And so I think that you're seeing that on the Greenland issue where, you know, Starmer came |
| 2:10.4 | out with a press statement saying that the UK and Europe are not going to be bullied by |
| 2:15.9 | Trump over Greenland and responding to the |
| 2:18.7 | tariff threat and that sort of thing. |
| 2:20.5 | And there's just this general sense that Starrmer is not reacting pretty strongly. |
| 2:25.3 | And it doesn't help that, I mean, the leaders in Europe who are unhappy about Trump's |
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