Starmer is flying back from Baku tonight. Some hacks are asking – is Keir flying too much?
Guido has crunched the numbers by tracking Starmer’s flights on government jets for overseas trips since 5th July. The PM and his crew have racked up an astonishing 125 hours and 30 minutes of flight time since they got into government. That means Starmer has spent, in hours, the equivalent of over three working weeks jetting around the globe…
Starmer has set an even stricter carbon emissions target for the UK’s citizens to adhere to in Baku than already existed. The country has to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 60% in just over a decade. Guido has a suggestion for where to start…
3.16kg CO₂ are emitted per kilogram of jet fuel combusted. An Airbus A321, the model which Keir loves to jet around on, consumes between 2,200 and 2,440 – which means it puffs out approximately 7,331.2kg (or about 7.33 tonnes) of CO₂ per hour of flying.
In the UK the average car driven for the average amount of time releases 1,393,920 grams of CO₂ into the atmosphere each year. Which means Starmer has exceeded the annual emissions of an average UK car by about 660 times – and that’s just since the summer election…
Keir was known for his love of limos back in the DPP job and racked up £250,000 in personal travel expenses. This has blown that record out of the water. Does the PM have a phobia of not flying?
Read Guido’s breakdown of Starmer’s flight times below:
Washington 9th July: 14 hours, 49 minutes
Berlin 14th July: 2 hours, 56 minutes
Paris 26th July: 2 hours, 47 minutes
Belfast 19th August: 2 hours, 24 minutes
Paris/Berlin 28th August: 3 hours, 43 minutes
Dublin 7th September: 1 hour, 46 minutes
USA 12th September: 15 hours, 22 minutes
Rome 15th September: 4 hours, 11 minutes
NYC 24th September: 14 hours, 34 minutes
Berlin/Brussels 18th October: 4 hours, 37 minutes
Samoa 22nd October: 42 hours, 56 minutes
Budapest 7th November: 4 hours, 21 minutes
Paris, Baku 11th November: 11 hours, 4 minutes
Downing Street said Starmer opened up this week’s Cabinet meeting by saying:
“Distractions meant our focus shifted from where it mattered most, working every day in service of the British people. People were rightly impatient for change and we had to deliver that rather than talk about ourselves [and] that meant working as one team.”