Keir Starmer is polling as the UK’s most unpopular prime minister on record. Where did it all go wrong?

By Christian Edwards, CNN

Liverpool, England (CNN) — A year ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the largest majority in Parliament this century and consigned the Conservatives, Labour’s historic rival, to its worst defeat. Now, after 15 months in power, Starmer has become the most unpopular British prime minister on record.

Although previous leaders have joined despised foreign wars, bungled responses to a pandemic and nearly sent the economy into meltdown, none have been as unpopular as Starmer, according to Ipsos, a leading pollster. Just 13% of voters say they are satisfied with Starmer, while 79% are unsatisfied.

Labour has “suffered the worst-ever fall in support for a newly elected government,” said John Curtice, the doyen of polling in Britain. But he is not surprised: Thanks to Britain’s electoral system, Labour won about two-thirds of seats with just one-third of the votes cast. Accounting for low turnout, Curtice said just one in five Britons voted for Starmer’s Labour Party. As landslides go, Starmer’s was loveless.

Things have only gotten worse since then. Labour has slumped to around 20% in recent polls, while Reform UK – the upstart hard-right party led by firebrand Nigel Farage – has surged to around 35%, the same share that Labour won last year. Many in Labour fear they face handing Reform UK a majority as large as their own in the next election, due in 2029.

That fear hung over Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, on England’s northwestern coast, where members of Parliament (MPs) and party members gathered this week to take stock of a country that is running out of patience for what Labour is selling, and of sympathy for its salesman.

To voters, Starmer remains an enigma. He famously told an interviewer that he doesn’t dream. He doesn’t have a favorite novel. While previous occupants of 10 Downing Street have put up photos of their political heroes, Starmer says he doesn’t have one. And although Starmer made a virtue of being more pragmatic than ideological, Curtice said the absence of “Starmerism” has left voters confused.

“The mystery of Keir Starmer – who is he? what does he stand for? – we are maybe two-thirds of the way through the novel, but we are still not sure where the body lies,” Curtice said.

Original sin

Fourteen years of Conservative governments left Britain’s public services in tatters. National Health Service (NHS) waiting lists reached record highs. Prisons overflowed. Infrastructure decayed. Labour, with its history of building Britain’s public services, was in part elected to fix them.

But before entering office, Labour hamstrung itself by “falling for a trap the Tories laid for them,” said Chris Mullin, a former Labour MP. Knowing they were headed for defeat, the Conservatives cut taxes shortly before the election, leaving Labour to have to raise them once in government.

But Starmer, wanting to avoid renewing Labour’s image as “the party of tax rises,” ruled out raising the income tax, shutting off a major source of revenue for the government.

“From that moment onwards, they were doomed,” Mullin told CNN. Rather than setting out a positive case for raising taxes to spend on public services, Labour had to “scramble about” for smaller sources of revenue from smaller, more vulnerable sources – a politically unpopular alternative.

A backbench Labour MP told CNN that Starmer missed a chance to “set out a vision” and that he had has since “struggled to weave a coherent narrative” of how his subsequent policies hang together.

Pollsters agree. Luke Tryl, director of the nonprofit More in Common, said voters have felt that Labour’s economic policies appear to “pick on people” at “random.” Last year, Labour announced it was ending a universal subsidy to help older people pay their heating bills in winter and cutting some benefits to disabled people, only to backtrack on both after a backlash.

Those debacles not only angered voters but showed to the bond markets that Labour would struggle to shore up Britain’s public finances. The result has been higher long-term borrowing costs, further dampening investment.

Tryl said it was a mistake to assume that voters would treat Labour’s first year as “year zero,” adding: “For lots of people, since the financial crash, they’ve been told, ‘We need to make tough choices, and eventually we’ll get there’ – and nothing is getting better.”

In focus groups, Tryl said the most common word voters associated with Starmer before the election was “boring.” Now, those words are “weak” and “useless.”

‘A fight for the soul of our country’

Into this void strode Farage, whose brash, combative style of politics – honed during his campaign for Britain to leave the European Union – contrasts with Starmer’s more buttoned-up managerialism.

Farage has hounded Labour over its struggles to control illegal immigration. Every year, tens of thousands of people wash up on England’s shores in small boats and become trapped in administrative limbo – often housed in hotels while their asylum claims are processed.

Seeking to stop voters from flocking to Reform UK, Labour talked tough on immigration. Starmer regularly posted on social media about measures his government was taking to crack down on small boats, and he warned that Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers.” Critics accused him of aping Farage’s rhetoric and warned that Labour could lose votes to the left in trying to court the right.

The hardening of Britain’s immigration debate came to a head this summer. Violent protests erupted outside asylum hotels before some 100,000 people joined an anti-immigration march in London, during which Elon Musk told the crowd: “You either fight back or die.”

Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Starmer, told CNN the march was a “defining moment,” one that required Labour to set “clearer dividing lines” with Reform.

In his conference speech, Starmer said Britons face “a fight for the soul of our country.”

“Britain stands at a fork in the road,” he said. “We can choose decency, or we can choose division.”

Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, also warned that Farage and his acolytes were turning “patriotism, a force for good,” into something “more like ethnonationalism,” a mindset reluctant to accept that someone like her – a British Muslim with Pakistani parents – “can truly be English or British.” She called for “belief in a greater Britain, not a littler England.”

The conference was buoyed by the sense that Reform UK had overstepped its mark. Last week, Reform pledged to abolish indefinite leave to remain (ILR), which gives migrants settled status in Britain. Starmer, far sharper in his criticisms of Reform, labeled the policy “racist.”

Labour does, however, have a fine line to tread between conveying competence on immigration and not alienating its progressive voter base. In a major announcement, Mahmood said Labour would double the time to qualify for ILR from five years to 10. Critics have questioned how Labour can label Reform’s policies as “racist” while unveiling similar ones of their own.

Renewal or revolution?

Campaigning last year, Labour said it would take two parliamentary terms – a decade – to renew Britain. Despite dire polls, it said it has made progress, especially internationally, as Starmer has helped restore Britain’s ties with its European allies. Richard Hermer, the attorney general, said the recent “one-in-one-out” deal to return migrants to France is a measure of how Britain no longer plays “fast and loose” with its international commitments, as it did during the Brexit years.

Domestically, Labour says its pledge to build 1.5 million homes and reform taxation will also take years, not months. Although the threat of Russia has spurred Europe to bolster its defense spending, Luke Pollard, Britain’s minister for defense procurement, says the drive to become “ready for war” will stimulate the economy. Just as there was a “peace dividend” after World War II, Pollard says Britain can reap a “defense dividend” as it rearms.

Throughout the conference, MPs and analysts stressed that Farage-fueled fears about immigration will abate if Labour improves living standards. The government’s bet is that, if Britons feel rich enough by 2029, they will not be tempted to “roll the dice” on Reform UK.

But one problem with a “decade of national renewal” is that it takes a decade. Another is that many Britons seem more interested in revolution than mere renewal.

“Our path, the path of renewal, it’s long, it’s difficult, it requires decisions that are not cost-free or easy,” Starmer told the conference. “Yet at the end of this hard road, there will be a new country, a fairer country, a land of dignity and respect.”

Whether enough Britons want this is another question. Against Starmer’s pledge to build a “tolerant, decent, respectful” Britain over many years, Farage is selling something sharper, more immediate. Has Starmer overestimated the public’s appetite for complexity?

“I truly believe that the British public understand the difficulty of the times and that they have a government that is listening carefully and doing everything it can,” Hermer, the attorney general, told CNN.

“Although it is a long and slow process … I ultimately believe when it comes to election night in a few years’ time, the British public will be able to smell a fraud,” Hermer added.

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