Keir Starmer’s ratings have crashed and burned fewer than 100 days after his party’s landslide victory. It’s not unusual for a leader’s popularity to take a hit in the early stages of their tenure. When it comes to Starmer, however, it’s the breakneck speed of the plummet that is remarkable. At party conference in Liverpool last week Labour activists were, at once, panicked and incredulous, all adamant that Starmer would have to step aside soon.
Trends used to sustain themselves for years. But now six months is a long lifecycle for an idea. It certainly felt like that while I was surveying the so-called party faithfuls: Starmer is in; Starmer is out; it’s time for Starmer to go! What kind of fealty is this?
Rishi Sunak’s favourability fell 11 points only 70 days into the job. Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron and Gordon Brown had fairly stable net ratings over the same period. Starmer’s, meanwhile, have tumbled 18 points.
All of this led to an intervention from Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times last week. “There isn’t, and perhaps cannot be, such a thing as a popular government in large parts of the west any more” he wrote. His contention is that after decades of peace and affluence, voter expectations have been raised.
Ganesh rattles through a coterie of examples – Olaf Scholz will likely be the second single-term chancellor of Germany since 1949; Emmanuel Macron “has incurred the most vehement protests in France since 1968”; Australia, he notes, has had seven prime ministers since 2007. Surely this can’t all be because of their personal failings?
He is right to look outside Britain. We can't write off the existence of the popular politician with only Starmer as a case study (he was probably never cut out to be one in the first place). One other thing to note is that while large Western nations lack popular politicians, smaller ones don’t (Simon Harris in Ireland, for example, is surprisingly well-liked).
In decades gone by, US presidents were almost always popular. Barack Obama’s approval ratings barely touched the heights of Richard Nixon, Lyndon B Johnson or Ronald Reagan (further evidence for Ganesh’s case). “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” was chanted at Johnson all the while his approvals were around -8. Joe Biden's approvals right now are at -12.
People used to believe that politicians were doing something good for the common man (a suspicion that would earn you ridicule these days). Cynicism has always existed in politics – during the Second World War, for example, the polls reflected an electorate suspicious that its government was corrupt. But this disposition intensified in the late 1980s and early 1990s – reflected in politicians’ floundering approval ratings.
There is a deeper issue. In an era of hyper-globalisation, socially mobile workers are uprooted from their local identities. Without organised religion, shared cultural reference points and similar high streets, society has become siloed. The data says that the average US voter today has similar politics to the average voter in the 1990s. This is terribly misleading. Half the country has become more liberal and the other half more conservative (feigning the appearance of the 1990s political landscape).
Starmer only received one third of the popular vote. But he did try to broaden his base and “reach across the aisle”. His intransigence on reopening the Brexit wars, despite Remainer protestations, felt like a pretty broad-church thing to do. But it still didn’t net him many Leavers. It just left a substantial number of former Tory voters happy to stay at home in July's election (Starmer was not the bogeyman Jeremy Corbyn was).
It is – in short – much harder to have broad appeal when society is polarised than when it is – relatively – homogeneous.
[See also: The Tories are in a different world to voters]
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