Labour’s Keir Starmer is something of an enigma. He comes across as a mild mannered family man, whose old-fashioned English politeness and bank manager appearance helps him to get along famously with international leaders without necessarily sharing any of their views.
His fan base includes the unpredictable American President Donald Trump, the modern day Napoleonic head of the French Republic Emmanuel Macron and the real Empress of Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, who presides over the European Commission which the UK is edging closer to while it plays a transatlantic balancing act.
While all this may have helped lift the UK’s standing on the world stage (particularly after the disasters of Brexit and Boris Johnson during the 14 years of Tory misrule), British voters have largely turned against the tool maker’s son, who rose to the pinnacle of British political power after the General Election on 4 July 2024.
It is coming up to Starmer’s first anniversary as Prime Minister after he secured a landslide victory – at least in terms of seats in the House of Commons for the Labour Party.
Lack of depth
However, the lack of depth in his support is now exposed – coupled with a series of political mis-steps, – topped by the disastrous decision to axe the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
Support for Starmer’s government fell dramatically over its first ten months, with YouGov’s mid May opinion poll giving Starmer a net favourability rating of minus 46%, with 69% having an unfavourable view of him as prime minister and only 23% giving a positive opinion.
It hasn’t helped that the last General Election was the least proportional in British history and exposed the unfairness of the UK democratic system and its failure to accurately reflect how people actually voted. While it avoids the coalition chaos that plagues governments in Europe, it means that Starmer achieved a 174-seat majority on the back of just over a third of those who voted.
Only 2% more than Corbyn
Labour’s share of the vote only increased by 2% from what the previous Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2019 (and many thought that was a disaster for Labour)., But that 34% of votes won by Starmer translated into 63% of the seats in parliament.
What really happened was that the country turned en masse against the Conservatives, with the Tory vote crumbling to 24% which translated into just 19% of the seats – thanks to Britain’s ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system and the traditional Tory vote splitting with the surge of support for the new nationalist Reform Party.
Led once again by Nigel Farage, Reform is the latest reincarnation of the Brexit Party and UKIP, and it did real damage to Conservative chances by gaining 14% of the overall vote, even if it only secured 1% of the seats in the House of Commons.
Farage has now started shifting his party to the left in economic policies, like supporting British Steel’s re-nationalisation, while maintaining its generally right-wing stance on issues like immigration and being friendly with Trump as it prepares to strike at Labour’s electoral base at the next General Election. A taste of what might happen came after Reform won a string of victories in traditional Labour heartlands in recent council elections.
Fixing broken Britain
So, many are now asking whether Labour’s dream of being in power for ten-years to give it enough time to fix ‘Broken Britain’ will be ended half-way through.
Is the next General Election, due in 2029. lost for Labour as Britain’s old two-party system, at least in England, splinters into three or four, or five major parties with Reform, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens also winning sizeable chunks of the vote and forcing coalition governments on the Brits?
And is there anything Starmer can do to sell his vision to a politically cynical British public – and what is Labour’s ‘Plan for Change’ anyway?
Hope of a reset
Hope now rests on Labour’s recent reset in the form of a Spending Review on 11 June 2025, which announced key investments in the National Health Service, house building and science & technology in the hope of generating economic renewal.
But much also depends on Starmer becoming more likeable to key groups of the electorate who may be tempted to go left and vote for independents like Corbyn or the Lib Dems or Greens, or head right and give the unknown, but seemingly better organised, Reform Party, a chance of real power.
To try to find out what makes Starmer tick, Tom McTague, who is now editor of the New Statesman (The Staggers), a magazine for left-leaning intellectuals, joined Labour Prime Minister as he trundled around on official visits at home and abroad, including meeting the crew of a British aircraft carrier before it set sail on the high seas.
McTague was even invited to share ‘a matey-pint’ with Starmer in Downing Street at the end of his marathon. Time and again, he raised tricky questions, like whether Starmer was worried about being prime minister while a potential genocide was being carried out by an ally that Britain has a close security relationship with in Gaza. Starmer evaded answering.
Over casual and snatched conversations, McTague tried to prise from the uptight premier why he had sanctioned the winter fuel payment cock-up, which the government has now partially retreated from and whether Starmer regretted borrowing the language of Enoch Powell in his ‘island of strangers’ speech to try to sound tough on immigration.
Fascinating profile
It is a fascinating 10,000-word read and I even forked-out £5.95 for the printed magazine, which shows a rather sad and subdued Labour prime minister peering out from the front cover with the words ‘WHAT HE CAN”T SAY.’
You can actually read the article online, so all I need to say is that Keir Starmer remains a man of mystery. A non-political politician who has moved with ease from being a light left-winger and human rights lawyer to the Labour Prime Minister who threatens to cut disability welfare payments to chase claimants back to work.
Starmer’s mission, he says again and again, is to fix a broken Britain, but he doesn’t seem to think it is as broken as his Health Secretary Wes Streeting does when talking about the National Health Service.
So, what we seem to have with Starmer, according to McTague, is a rather unexciting and slightly awkward Labour version of the ‘grey man’ of Tory politics, John Major, who replaced Margaret Thatcher when Britain last faced being torn apart by the growing gap between the haves-and-the-have-nots.
Promises change – but offer conservation
Starmer sees himself as the great healer rather than a great helmsman, but McTague is not convinced he always says what he believes. “He promises change – but offers conservation”, writes McTague in his New Statesman profile of the Labour leader.
Pressed once again towards the end of McTague’s piece, Starmer finally says: “I know what my job is. To clear up the mess.”
Let’s hope he succeeds and, of course, one of those messes that Sue Gray (Starmer’s key adviser until he sacked her) had highlighted was the very real danger of a couple of universities going bust.
That’s a story for another day when I return to my normal day job of writing about the woes facing UK higher education.
For now, I just wish that Starmer would be a bit more political, and especially politically aware so he avoids the more obvious pitfalls.
- Main image: LabourList
