Keir Starmer Resigns: Can Anyone Survive as Prime Minister in Today’s Britain?

Yves here. Your humble blogger is not remotely expert enough on UK politics to discuss the long-overdue departure of Starmer and the new Labor leadership contest in any detail. Nevertheless, this article has some points that strike me as sour notes and will hopefully stir informed discussion. For instance, it makes a naive comparison between the decline in Corbyn’s popularity ratings and that of Starmer, when Corbyn (like Sanders but more obviously so) was on the receiving end of a massive media campaign against him, centered on bogus charges of anti-Semitism.

An article sent by Micael T may serve as a useful counterpoint. From Anti-politician Starmer leaves after reviving the 90s. From the top:

Less than two years after his record election victory, Keir Starmer’s ideology-free project has run aground. His political legacy is the victory over Corbynism, the imprisonment of pensioners and a lack of vision that makes Tony Blair appear utopian.

When Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday morning, few mourned. Even his most devoted supporters can no longer muster any enthusiasm for the empty package of platitudes that the Starmer project was from day one.

To understand how someone so teflon-like, with no previous experience as an elected politician, could become prime minister, one must recall the context in which his career began. It was as an associate of Labour’s left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn that Starmer first made a name for himself in politics – after a long career as a prosecutor where he, among other things, brought left-wing political activists to justice.

That background in the Corbyn camp initially gave Starmer’s project a certain left-wing veneer, although he himself did his best to get rid of it. When he was elected party leader after the 2019 election defeat, it was not long before Sir Keir showed where he really stood. Corbyn was expelled from his own party and the hundreds of thousands of members who had joined Labour under his chairmanship, making the party the largest in Western Europe, were either silenced or kicked out if they had not already left of their own accord . In retrospect, it is hard not to see this as Starmer’s main legacy: to restore Labour as a centrist party.

When Labour won a landslide election victory in the summer of 2024, it was more a result of the Tory party having broken up after almost 15 years in power than any enthusiasm for Labour’s new programme. It was certainly more left-leaning than it had been for a long time, a result of the general influence of the Corbyn era on the political landscape on the left. But how little could really be expected of a Starmer government became clear even before it took office .

Less than a year after Liz Truss’ disastrous experiment with unfunded tax cuts in a high-inflation environment in the autumn of 2023, Starmer’s advisers had learned their lesson: all expansionary programmes would be put on hold – voters would understand that they could not expect much, because this was a responsible government. In many ways, the Starmer era was a political re-enactment of the 1990s. Accountability and austerity once again became watchwords, surface was prioritised over substance, politics became a matter of communication rather than action, change was a word overused in interviews rather than actually worked to achieve.

The difference, however, is that none of the third-way socialists of the 90s even come close to Starmer’s total lack of vision.

By Nicholas Dickinson, Lecturer in Politics, University of Exeter. Originally published at The Conversation

Keir Starmer has resigned as leader of the Labour party, and so in time as the UK’s prime minister. In the end, despite his numerous assurances that he would fight on, after Andy Burnham’s resounding win in the Makerfield byelection, the pressure on Starmer became too great to withstand. It makes him the sixth British PM in a decade to stand down.

The immediate cause of his decision was the final collapse in support for him in the party and in cabinet, clarified in private conversations over the weekend. In setting out his plans, Starmer has avoided the avalanche of resignations that toppled Conservative PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

The overall aim seems to be a more orderly transition – “with good grace” – than those under recent Conservative governments. Yet his emotional statement reflecting on his time in the highest office still highlights a leader who knows he has failed.

Starmer was not popular the day before he walked into 10 Downing Street. On the eve of the 2024 general election, his net satisfaction rating with Ipsos stood at minus 21. This was a historic low for an incoming prime minister. While 31% of the public said they were satisfied with his performance, 52% were dissatisfied, marking the first time a leader had secured a parliamentary majority while holding a significantly negative approval rating.

Yet in the environment of British politics since the Brexit referendum, such figures hardly seemed unusual. Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak entered the 2024 campaign with a net satisfaction score of minus 56, according to YouGov.

At the time, I argued that Starmer would likely see an upsurge in popularity having actually achieved a Labour victory after 14 long years. In 1997, Tony Blair enjoyed a record-breaking honeymoon with satisfaction ratings soaring to plus 60 in the months following his victory. Even David Cameron saw his approval leap to plus 21 shortly after forming the coalition in 2010. The office of prime minister typically confers a halo of competence on its new occupant.

Starmer’s popularity did indeed improve. But only to a kind of tepid neutrality. In the immediate aftermath of the election, his net favourability rose to plus 3 in Opinium’s first post-election poll, while YouGov recorded a similarly rapid recovery to roughly break even. Unlike the sustained euphoria of the Blair years, Starmer’s “bounce” was in absolute terms a shallow recovery that barely lifted him above the water line before the tides turned once again.

At the same time, measured by his majority, he seemed in an unassailable position. Yet the same could have (and indeed was) said of Boris Johnson. Following the 2019 election, talk was of the Conservatives securing a “decade of dominance”, arguing that the structural realignment of the “red wall” had created a near-permanent Tory majority that would keep Labour out of power until the 2030s. In the event, Johnson was out just over three years later and the talk now is of Conservative extinction.

A Dangerous Pattern

Where did it go wrong for Starmer? Paradoxically, the answer may be found in the fate of his predecessor as Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn’s record now looks similar to Starmer’s. Between 2017 and 2019, Corbyn’s personal ratings plummeted from a competitive minus 11 during the 2017 campaign to a disastrous minus 44 by the time of his 2019 defeat. By then, the strategic ambiguity that once held his coalition together collapsed under the pressure of Brexit.

Starmer’s rise and fall took almost exactly the same period of time. And it happened for a set of reasons uncomfortably similar for either side of the Labour party’s ideological divide to admit. In both 2017-2019 and 2022-24, Labour’s fragile polling lead was driven less by enthusiasm for the opposition and more by a collapse in government competence. As data from the 2024 “loveless landslide” illustrated, Labour secured around 64% of seats on just 34% of the vote – the lowest share for any majority government in history.

Just as Corbyn was squeezed by the populist-right Brexit party and pro-EU centre party the Liberal Democrats in 2019 over its middle-of-the-road position on Brexit, Starmer faced a similar pincer movement in the mid-2020s. On one flank, Reform UK eroded the Labour vote in post-industrial heartlands; on the other, the Green Party and pro-Gaza independents successfully targeted urban progressives. The Greens ended up quadrupling their MPs in 2024 and independent candidates secured historic wins in Labour strongholds.

Labour’s electoral results in office reflected this – byelection losses to both Reform UK and the Greens, disastrous local election results in England, and failing to dislodge a struggling and scandal-plagued Scottish National Party north of the border.

Fittingly, this latest resignation took place almost exactly ten years to the day of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Make no mistake, the divides created and solidified as a result of the Brexit moment are still at the heart of British politics – even if many people have forgotten the details of that dispute.

As Professor Tim Bale has recently argued, British politics is best seen as an example of two-bloc polarisation. Voters are locked into broad identity-based camps and Brexit position is the key underlying variable. Yet this reality is obscured by the fact that these blocs are internally fragmented and only occasionally address the issue directly.

While voters may occasionally unite against a common enemy, they remain deeply divided on other aspects of policy, leaving leaders like Starmer (or Corbyn, for that matter) trying to hold together a sandcastle coalition that crumbles the moment the tide comes in.