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Starmer’s squandering of a historic election victory is a tragedy nearing its finale | Rafael Behr
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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Yeah we have a combined COVID and Ukraine inflation bomb after 14 years of underinvestment...
I mean look at Starmer's missteps compared to the missteps of all the Tory PMs. Somehow Starmer is less popular than all of them. I think it's therefore safe to say that his unpopularity is not mostly due to things he's doing wrong, because in spite of it all, he's still doing better than any recent Tory leader.
I think you're raising half of a fair point here, which is that Labour PMs are judged differently from Tory PMs. But I also think some of those differences in judgment are fair: people were expecting public services to get visibly better and their pay to get visibly greater, because those are 'the kinds of things Labour does'. I don't think it's entirely unfair that we're judged stringently against those values because those are our values!
I don't think it's surprising that Labour is being judged this way, but what I started this off by saying was that I don't think they'll really improve with a new leader. Two things are clearly true:
But seeing them together and thinking, "we can have a more popular (and successful) government by changing the leader, and this is clearly true because of this combination" - which is the logic I saw - is wrong.
Maybe Starmer was the wrong pick for leader and we're seeing this now, and having a different one would have been better. But at this point it's too late unless there is clear evidence that Starmer himself is a massive problem, which their isn't. There's all these other explanations for his personal unpopularity that would apply to any other leader too. So replacing him might get rid of his propensity for mistakes, might get in someone a bit more left-wing than centrist, but it must be recognised that "a few fewer mistakes and a bit less centrist" is not a good reason to swap leader, given how bad that is in other ways. It's his unpopularity that is propping up this narrative.
It's not that getting rid of Starmer will definitely improve things, it's that it might and that he, clearly, at this point cannot!