Most people in Britain think that Keir Starmer has outlived any use he might have had as Labour leader, according to YouGov’s bimonthly poll of the prime minister’s popularity.
Some 40 percent think he should resign as leader, and only 37 percent think he should stay on, according to the May survey. The same thing happened in January, with only a blip in between.
In another YouGov poll, Starmer is disliked by 51 percent of the population and only popular with 22 percent.
It hasn’t always been this way. Before this year, you had to go back to autumn 2021, long before he was prime minister, to find statistics that showed most people thought Starmer should resign.
And Starmer is dragging the whole government down with him. Labour’s drop in the opinion polls in its first 10 months of power is the largest of any newly elected UK government in 40 years, according to a Guardian analysis.
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The drop in approval is comparable to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fall from grace in February 2022, when Partygate was at its peak.
The areas where voters think the government is least capable of solving problems are health, housing and the economy. As the Guardian reported, the proportion of the public who think Labour can handle these problems the best has dropped since the party took power. “The biggest drops were recorded in health, housing and the economy.”
This is terrible news for Labour, since they are precisely the problems that the government has pledged to solve.
Power struggle
The recent Runcorn by-election result and the council election results on the same day crystallised all these concerns in the minds of Labour MPs, especially those who are more worried about staying in office than about their constituents’ welfare. After all, Runcorn was the 49th safest Labour seat in the country, and it was lost to Reform.
Soft left MPs are now urging Angela Rayner, Labour’s ineffective deputy leader, to challenge Starmer.
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Those on the traditional left, the remains of Corbynism in the parliamentary Labour Party, don’t want to be left out of a post-Starmer struggle for the leadership. Consequently, MP John McDonnell called for a rank-and-file challenge to Starmer within days of the rumours about Rayner’s possible challenge becoming public.
McDonnell painted a devastating picture of the party leadership, asserting that a power struggle was taking place already: “What we are now witnessing is a panicked, half-hearted policy retreat, while the backroom boys – Morgan McSweeney in the leader’s office and Nick Parrott in the deputy leader’s office – fight between themselves.”
Starmer is already reacting to this pressure. The rhetorical U-turn over Gaza is the most obvious concession to critics, although it is also a response to signs that the US administration is finding Israel’s genocidal policy in Gaza to be more of a hindrance than a help in its overall plan to revive the Abraham Accords.
But Starmer’s partial retreat on winter fuel allowance is also meant to take the sting out of his critics’ case.
The problem for Starmer is that this kind of “messy reset”, as the New Statesman described it, will further deepen the crisis in Labour. Indeed, Starmer may be about to learn the truth of historian Alexis de Tocqueville’s adage that “the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform”.
Petulant mantra
Starmer has shown that he is only really good at one thing: attacking the left. He is a classic Thermidorian figure, seemingly from the left but transmuting into the nemesis of Corbynism.
What is equally obvious is that these factional skills are of little use in running a government. Starmer’s frequently issued mantra of “I won’t stand for it” – whatever today’s “it” might be – may sound authoritative in internal party debates, but simply comes across as petulant amid recalcitrant economic realities.
The more he gives ground, the more hollow and inconsistent he sounds
The more he gives ground, the more hollow and inconsistent he sounds. It is very unlikely that his rigidity and sense of entitlement will allow him to find another model of leadership, not least because of the utter conventionality of his economic and social programme.
More seriously, just as he is attempting to placate the left, he is also making gross adaptations to Reform leader Nigel Farage’s racist rhetoric. This is making an already threadbare ideology look positively self-contradictory at best, and openly racist at worst.
So it very much looks as if the wheels are coming off the Starmer wagon. But does this mean he will be replaced before the next election?
He still has some reserves, including a whopping Commons majority, which will insulate him from opposition attacks and backbench rebellions – unless they are of tsunami proportions.
Writing on the wall
Starmer is also blessed with his Tory opponent, Kemi Badenoch, who is even more unpopular than Starmer, and seems even less effective as a leader. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is more popular than Starmer with a negative rating of minus 8, compared to Starmer’s negative rating of minus 46, but it’s hard to say whether – given that his every public appearance is an ill-conceived stunt – Davey is a politician or a personality who has escaped from BBC light entertainment.
But these are advantages of limited value when the real challenge that Starmer faces is from Farage’s Reform.
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Farage is more popular than Starmer, and Reform has effectively replaced the Tories as the main right-wing opposition to Labour.
Starmer is building Reform support through his economic attacks on the welfare state, fuelling discontent within Labour, and by mimicking Farage’s hostility towards refugees.
Rayner supporters are talking of the council and other elections in 2026 as a watershed moment for Starmer’s leadership. But it could be sooner. One or two more by-election losses could push already-nervous Labour MPs to don the white coats and head over to 10 Downing Street.
Reform is the most obvious beneficiary. But Labour is so low in the polls that in some constituencies, it could lose to the SNP in Scotland or to the Liberal Democrats in other places.
A left alliance of independents, rumoured to be the project that former leader Jeremy Corbyn is working on, would also threaten Labour’s arrogant assumption that progressives have no one else to support.
The writing is on the wall for Starmer, and time may be much shorter than he imagines.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
