Goodbye, Keir Starmer?

By the time you read this, Sir Keir Starmer will … still be prime minister of the UK. But only just. And not for long.

Probably until this autumn, in fact. But that’s only because his enemies (by which I mean his own Labour MPs and cabinet ministers, not the opposition Conservatives) have nobody lined up to replace him.

I write this before polling stations close across England, Scotland and Wales, for huge local elections to councils, and to the two national parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff. (Which I wrote about before, here).

Labour is expected to be wiped out across the north of England by the far-right racists of Reform (Nigel Farage’s new-ish latest party), and by the newly-resurgent and genuinely leftwing Greens in London. 

In Wales, which Labour has governed every day since Tony Blair created the Welsh Assembly in the late 1990s, they will lose power and lose badly. The only question is whether Reform or the Greens will come out on top. 

In Scotland, which has been won by the Scottish National Party in four consecutive elections spanning more than 20 years, and was once a bedrock of Labour support, they will actually continue to lose more seats in opposition, rather than progress.

All of which makes it all the more incredible that Starmer, a personality-free zone, with no discernible policy ideas or political antennae, has been British PM for less than two years.

He was elected, after 14 years of Conservative austerity, misrule, lies, and economic collapse, with a near record-breaking 174 majority (411 seats out of 650) in July 2024. He should, by rights, still be in the glow of his honeymoon period.

Instead, according to IPSOS opinion polling, he is the most unpopular PM since tracking began in 1977. In October, he was on minus 45 percent and after the Mandelson scandal, things have got a lot worse since then.

In fact, this is unarguably unfair, since Starmer follows from the two-faced lying of Boris Johnson over Covid parties, and the incompetent Liz Truss, who survived just 44 days as PM, after crashing the UK economy immediately after entering Downing Street.

But Starmer was elected two summers ago on a one-word manifesto: “Change.”

Voters expected that meant “…for the better”. Instead, Starmer used his first major speech in the rose garden of Downing Street to stress that things were about to get much, much worse. That tanked business confidence and depressed his own supporters.

Then he pursued the fatal and cowardly path of alienating his own side, in order to look to court the racist vote of Farage’s fan club. That falls between two stools – it failed to convince Reform voters to vote for Pepsi when they’ve already got Coke, and it pissed off Labour voters, leaving him high, dry, and friendless.

‘Sack the manager!’

But as the great Guardian political editor, Michael White, taught me 20 years ago: “It’s like football fans demanding ‘Sack The Manager!’ Fine, great, sack the manager. But that’s only half the equation. Have you got somebody better, ready and willing to take over? If not, you only have half the answer”.

And that’s Labour’s predicament now.

Starmer will possibly respond on Friday (8 May) by sacking his loyal, but similarly ideas-free, chancellor Rachel Reeves (the first female chancellor of Britain, but far from a convincing or charismatic figure), but she is not to blame for Starmer’s own personal unpopularity. 

So where does that leave Brussels and the UK’s endlessly-promised ‘Brexit reset’? Nowhere.

Two years of faffing around, unable to even reintroduce student exchange schemes with continental Europe or ease food checks out of a paranoid fear of Farage and the rightwing press, means Brussels was right not to get too excited about a friendlier approach from London. 

They know that come 2029, it’s quite probable they will be dealing with Farage as prime minister.