A year after gambling on Starmer, Britain is gripped by buyer's remorse

Telegraph

7 hours ago

Sir Keir Starmer's personal polling ratings are so awful that some Labour backbenchers are beginning to question whether he can survive until the next election. His first year in office – which he'll mark next week with a major climbdown on welfare reform – has been catastrophic. Of the prime ministers since Thatcher, only Gordon Brown had a worse net approval rating at the same stage in his premiership.
On current polling, Labour is heading for a single term and a devastating defeat. It is only the split on the Right – with Right-leaning voters currently torn between Reform and the Tories – that is keeping Starmer even vaguely in contention with Nigel Farage's Reform, which comfortably tops the polls today.
Those who work in politics have become blasé about the rise of Reform, as if their standing on 34 points in the polls is a normal, predictable state of affairs. It is not. British voters have clung to mainstream parties for as long as anyone can remember – yet now they are genuinely considering political revolution. And this is happening as a result of the perceived failure of conventional politicians, currently represented by Starmer.
Plummeting support
A comprehensive poll by public policy research agency Public First for The Telegraph reveals the scale of the Prime Minister's problems. Currently, 53 per cent of voters have a very unfavourable view of him, while just 26 per cent view him favourably. On the eve of the last election, Public First had Starmer with an approval rating of plus 1 per cent. The drop is dramatic.
A year ago, 47 per cent of voters said – when asked directly – that they liked Starmer, while 47 per cent said they did not. Now, 62 per cent say they do not like him, and just 33 per cent say they do. A year ago, 32 per cent of voters agreed with the statement 'I do not like the Labour Party or Keir Starmer'; a year on, that figure has risen to 44 per cent.
Crucially, a year ago voters regarded him as a good leader by a margin of 40 per cent to 29. Today, 48 per cent consider him a bad leader, with only 25 per cent still backing him. And by 53 per cent to 23, they believe he has performed poorly as Prime Minister.
Jumpy backbenchers will have picked up on at least some of these sentiments on the doorstep. Behind the briefing by Labour MPs against Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, is likely a deeper antipathy towards the Prime Minister himself.
The new polling was conducted even before it emerged this week that Starmer was preparing to cave in to Labour rebels and allow existing disability claimants to keep their benefits – a move likely to make him appear even weaker in the eyes of many voters. The survey shows that, given a choice of leading contenders, people believe Farage would make the best leader – ahead of Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader. These are the dreadful fundamentals Starmer should be most concerned about.
Starmer's undoing
Things started to go wrong for Keir Starmer almost immediately. Just weeks into his premiership, in the late summer of 2024, he was already in serious trouble with voters. Although he was dealt a difficult hand, he made a series of decisions that so alienated him from the public, those that voted for him may never return.
It's rare for individual events to have a measurable impact on public opinion – most come and go without voters noticing. But these incidents cut through – partly because Starmer was new in office and people were watching closely, but also because they genuinely mattered to people. Tracking polls at the time show that Starmer's favourability ratings dropped with each new crisis.
The riots in July 2024, which followed the murder of three young girls in Southport, posed an early challenge that Starmer initially failed to meet. Months on, vitriolic commentary still swirls around the perception of a two-tier justice system in the aftermath of the unrest. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to two years in prison for an offensive tweet, while critics point out that others – including those convicted of possessing disturbing sexual imagery of children – receive what amounts to a slap on the wrist.
At the time, however, public anger focused mainly on how long it took to quell the violence; under Starmer, the state appeared to have no grip on law and order. English voters, in particular, have little tolerance for disorder – they want it stamped out swiftly. The newly elected Cameron government flailed in the early stages of the 2011 riots, but cracked down more quickly, and their handling was ultimately seen as a net positive. Starmer took longer to restore order – and paid the price.
Far more serious damage to Starmer's reputation was done by his and Chancellor Rachel Reeves's decision, around the same time, to announce extensive cuts to winter fuel payments for pensioners. In a speech on July 29, Reeves blamed the move on a supposed £22 billion 'black hole' left by the previous government – but this never washed with the public. Given Labour's apparent generosity in pay negotiations with public sector workers, it felt to many as though the party always had enough money to reward its core voters – just not pensioners. This decision had a greater impact on public opinion than the riots.
So catastrophic were his first weeks in power that Starmer's approval rating dropped dramatically during this period. On YouGov's favourability tracker, he fell from a net score of zero – with as many people viewing him favourably as unfavourably (a perfectly respectable rating for a politician these days) – to minus nine in just a couple of weeks.
Things got worse still. In September, the Government was engulfed in a crisis over the early release of prisoners. The Ministry of Justice admitted that some of those let out had committed very serious crimes – not what the public had been led to believe. Starmer's standing took a further hit when one released inmate infamously thanked him for the 'privilege' of his early exit, before being collected by friends in a luxury car. A major set-piece speech on the NHS that same month did little to revive his fortunes.
It might have seemed that Starmer had stopped the slide in early autumn, with his international investment summit on October 14 giving a brief impression that he had a growth plan. However, any goodwill evaporated by the time of the Autumn Statement on October 30. The scale of new tax rises shocked businesses already struggling with weak growth, and the media fallout deeply unsettled voters weary from years of economic hardship.
Then, in January 2025, Keir Starmer found himself in an extraordinary clash with the world's richest man, Elon Musk, over the Government's alleged failure to take the fallout from grooming gangs seriously enough. The affair has since descended into farce, with Starmer and senior colleagues agreeing to a new investigation – after previously dismissing calls for one as politically motivated.
Starmer enjoyed a decent run at the end of winter, announcing on February 25 that defence spending would increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, while taking a more assertive and constructive role on the world stage. On February 28, during his first visit to the White House, he seemed to learn from Volodymyr Zelensky's disastrous Oval Office appearance the day before, pulling off a relative diplomatic triumph by emerging from his meeting with Donald Trump unscathed – and leaving the president pleased with a formal invitation for a state visit to Britain.
But the cumulative damage from Starmer's earlier mistakes may mean it's already over for the Prime Minister – just a year into his first term. Things have reached that serious a point.
Expectations
Before the election, voters said they would give Starmer's new government time. Many blamed the Conservatives for the country's predicament, as reflected in the collapse of the party's electoral vote. After 14 years in power, Britain seemed to be in a terrible state, and people acknowledged it would take time to set things right.
But even though my own polling showed people were prepared to be patient, I always doubted it would play out this way; voters are rarely patient about anything. They are especially intolerant of bad decisions that suggest either incompetence or, worse, the wrong values. In his first few months, Starmer appeared to show both.
One reason voters grew so quickly enraged was that Starmer and his senior team – perhaps inadvertently – massively inflated expectations about what could be achieved. Labour politicians believed they were being cautious by repeatedly stressing the terrible legacy they'd inherited. But their relentless criticism of Tory incompetence – blamed on extremism and stupidity – implied a promise of rapid progress, simply because, by their account, Labour did not share those same flaws.
Labour politicians seem genuinely shocked that the economy and wider society did not immediately respond to their touch. Voters themselves aren't shocked, but they are surprised that Labour appears 'just the same' – and have responded with a mix of exasperation and outright hostility.
Failure to deliver
For politicians, popularity is primarily driven by voters' judgment of their ability to deliver policy change. Tory failure on policy – on the NHS, immigration and the cost of living – explains the scale of their defeat in 2024. Labour policy failure explains the speed and scale of their fall.
When asked in the Public First poll which pledges Starmer had made progress on, by far the most popular answer was 'none of the above,' chosen by over 39 per cent of voters. Only small minorities believed he had made progress on any of the other promises drawn from Labour's 2024 election manifesto.
Only 24 per cent said he had made progress on cutting NHS waiting times – the only area where any reasonably positive change is believed to have occurred. Given that NHS failures were a key factor damaging the Tories before the last election, with voters desperate for quicker treatment, Labour must urgently improve these figures. Elsewhere, on issues of similar importance, only 8 per cent said Starmer had made progress in restoring order to the asylum system, and just 12 per cent believed he had improved border security.
Labour made a big deal of their ambition to change the country for the better – this was central to their manifesto, and Starmer and his front bench made it the defining theme of their election campaign. Yet only 10 per cent believe they have made progress in changing the country for the better; 11 per cent think they have begun to restore hope; and 14 per cent feel they have started to end the chaos within Government.
Carping during the pandemic
The public's dim view of Starmer dates back to his first months as Labour leader, following his election on April 4 2020, during the first Covid lockdown.
Starmer was unusually unpopular in his first year as Labour leader; voters reacted poorly to him almost immediately.
To be fair, he became leader at the worst possible time for the opposition. The pandemic was a period when voters first demanded total loyalty to the government during a national crisis, then quickly shifted to demanding concrete alternative ideas to get us out of the mess we seemed trapped in. They wanted new plans to improve track and trace, Covid testing and vaccine distribution. While in some ways unreasonable, this was the expectation voters held. From the earliest days through to the end of the pandemic – and until quite recently – voters in focus groups repeatedly criticised him for 'carping from the sidelines' and offering nothing constructive.
As the pandemic faded but chaos under the Tories continued, Starmer had one clear advantage: voters saw him as a low-drama politician. While the Tories delivered years of turmoil under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, Starmer quietly kept his own show running. Under his leadership, Labour stopped saying 'mad' things, and the eccentricities of the Corbyn years disappeared.
This is a big achievement, and it's to Starmer's massive credit that he pulled it off. But the scale of his success is lost on most voters. Most people have no idea – how could they? – about the challenge of running a bureaucracy like the Labour Party, with ideological enemies everywhere and rivals waiting to steal your job. All they really knew was that he was low-drama.
Even as Starmer built a formidable poll lead, he lagged badly in focus groups, with sceptical voters raising persistent doubts about his character. Things began to shift in late 2023. By spring 2024, focus groups finally mirrored the polls, and the popularity Labour and Starmer enjoyed in the surveys became a reality. People started saying he 'looked' like a leader, contrasting his calm demeanour with the headless chickens who had run the Conservative Party.
But the shift in most voters' attitudes was driven by the head, not the heart, and was therefore never truly 'real.' They never fully came to respect Starmer. Instead, they calculated that backing him was the best way to remove the Tories without placing the country in peril with a high-risk alternative – and that was most voters' priority by the election. People still said they knew little about him; they simply hoped he would be better than the Conservative option.
People simply didn't know who he was. In the Public First poll on Starmer conducted on the eve of the general election, nearly twice as many respondents incorrectly believed he was under 60 (when he is over 60). By a similar margin, many said he had never had to worry about money, despite his family struggling financially when he was a child. Other questions about who Starmer cares most about – whether young or old, business leaders or workers – also produced large numbers of 'don't know' responses.
If Starmer's lack of clear definition helped him just before the election, what was once a weakness early in his leadership has now returned as a weakness in his premiership. Being low-drama compared to the Tories was briefly an asset, but now it once again makes him seem unsure of what to do.
Policy delivery matters most but, for prime ministers, there is always more to it than this. Prime ministers are leaders – and voters demand dynamic leadership.
Starmer has never been able to convince the public he can provide this, which casts doubt on his ability to turn his reputation around.
Farage in the driving seat
Someone of Starmer's character – low-key, moderate and decent – is unlikely to 'communicate' his way out of trouble, especially with the threat from Reform looming. Great communicators can pin the blame on others or make the prospect of change seem worse than the status quo. But it's unlikely Starmer can convince people himself that change would be worse.
Instead, Starmer's strategy – which remains his best bet – is to quietly keep the show on the road and try to make tangible gains in a few key areas, which he can point to on the eve of the next election.
Those key areas are the NHS, migration, and growth.
On the NHS, he must at least show that more GPs are being recruited and that a medical cavalry is gathering on the horizon; it would also help if pharmacies were further empowered to provide basic treatments, speeding up care. On migration, the unfortunate reality is that he has no choice but to close hotels and begin swiftly removing significant numbers of failed asylum claimants, hopefully stemming the flow of boats. And on growth, he needs to at least offer small businesses hope by cutting taxes and easing their regulatory burden.
There's little chance he'll be able to show the country has 'changed' by the next election – and perhaps even less chance by the time he faces a challenge from a Labour rival. All he can hope for is to convince people the country is heading in the right direction, and to claim: 'It's working, don't let others ruin it.'
If he can make small amounts of measurable progress, it will put him in a strong position. That's because the unvarnished style that makes Reform politicians appealing to the public will likely lead their senior figures to say and do damaging things during this Parliament. Meanwhile, it's reasonable to expect the Tories will soon plunge back into civil war – a challenge to Badenoch is on the cards. In this context, Starmer could once again appear the least-worst option.
Regardless, we know enough about Starmer to be sure he will never fully be master of his own destiny. It won't just be Labour backbenchers pushing him around between now and the election. He will never dictate the terms of political debate in this country – that role will belong to Farage for the duration of this Parliament. Starmer will succeed only if others fail. In this climate, with his opponents occupying the volatile edges of the political spectrum, that's not necessarily a terrible place to be.