Published by : The Telegraph
Link to article : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/15/keir-starmer-albania-immigration-edi-rama-return-hubs/
Sir Keir will not be ‘getting on with’ much after Edi Rama’s blatant rejection of return hubs
An electorally successful Prime Minister for his country’s socialist party, yet dogged by personal corruption scandals, an overseer of sluggish growth and also of democratic backsliding, a fan of football but not of free speech, Keir Starmer met Edi Rama today, the Albanian prime minister.
The only visible difference between Sir Keir and his counterpart in Tirana was one of height. The gigantic Rama made Starmer look like a rejected member of Ken Dodd’s nightmarish sidekick group, the Diddy Men. Our Prime Minister had spent the morning at the port city of Durrës, presumably as a one-man, walking deterrent to the vast number of Albanians seeking to get to Britain. The adverts would write themselves: “Would you migrate to a country run by this man?”
Migration was the headline issue that brought Sir Keir to Albania. Normally on overseas trips, the job of the Prime Minister is to showcase the best of Britain to the world, encouraging trade, tourism and deeper engagement between us and the host nation. Here, his task was to do the opposite. In fairness, there are few people better qualified than Sir Keir to sell Britain down.
Much of the substance of the meeting, if you can call it that, was delivered in classic Starmerite form. A list of quangos, taskforces and the latest, “return hubs”, all designed to convince the nation that he’s tough on immigration. This was about being “practical, sleeves rolled up, getting on with the job” said Sir Keir, mercifully keeping his jacket on. Normally he prefers his visual metaphors as clunky as a bunker from the days of Enver Hoxha, Albania’s Communist leader in the 1980s.
Ukraine was also mentioned; Starmer talked about “the front line of Western values”. It had the slight air of those politburo appearances at the end of the Soviet Union; all that repetition of slogans and looking ahead to a fantasy future. The crumbling communist aesthetic and dour content that Starmer brings presumably makes older Albanians feel quite nostalgic.
Of course, the most popular Brit in Albania is famously not Sir Keir but another knight, Sir Norman Wisdom. As dictator, Hoxha believed the comedic incompetence of Wisdom’s recurring character, Norman Pitkin, and engagements with his boss, Mr Grimsdale, were a perfect metaphor for the struggle of socialism, and made it practically compulsory viewing. Of course, our own Prime Minister has a line in ideological promotion of TV shows; I just suspect that there are more laughs in a Norman Wisdom film than in Adolescence.
It was with an air of hubris that Sir Keir hinted that discussions about offshore processing were gaining ground. “Prime minister Edi and I think alike”, he said. “We prefer not to talk about a problem and walk around it but to get on with it”. This was certainly true of one of them. Within about two minutes, Mr Rama had very publicly destroyed Sir Keir’s dreams, by flatly denying that his country would ever host a “return hub”. Starmer didn’t dare contradict him; the Albanian prime minister looked like he’d have him for breakfast.
