‘No sense of direction’: The downfall of decent but despised Keir Starmer

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Starmer led the United Kingdom’s Labour Party to a landslide general election victory in July 2024, winning 411 seats in the House of Commons, a majority of 174. It was the third highest haul of seats achieved by Labour after Tony Blair’s landslides in 1997 and 2001. The UK, he told a jubilant crowd back then, had an opportunity “to get its future back”. But there were warning signs. His victory was achieved with just a 34 percent share of the vote. On Monday, he resigned as prime minister. “Every decision I have taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party,” he said. A former top lawyer, Starmer ran the Crown Prosecution Service for years and was known as methodical and process-driven. A relative novice to politics, he ascended to the helm of the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn in 2020 after only five years in the House of Commons. But Labour’s relatively limited popularity after the 2024 vote began to plunge quickly, along with Starmer’s approval ratings. “He did not define what he believed in and what the Labour Party believed in. He does not have a narrative, a story on what his long-term objectives are, what he wants and (had) no sense of direction,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and the UK’s most respected pollster, told Al Jazeera. “Starmer is a very clever lawyer. What he seems to lack is political antennas and the presence of a leader.” Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, recently described Starmer to Al Jazeera as a “poor communicator and one who messed up his first few months in office”. He lacked a vision “to inspire either his MPs or the public”, he added. A year into the job, according to the polling company Ipsos, net satisfaction with Starmer had plummeted to minus 66, “the lowest satisfaction rating recorded by Ipsos for any prime minister going back to 1977”, the pollster said. It has barely improved since then and is currently around minus 60. Seventy-six percent of people are dissatisfied with Starmer and just 16 percent are favourable. Even his Conservative predecessor Liz Truss, whose political longevity of 49 days was mocked as having a shorter shelf life than a lettuce, only fell as low as minus 51 in Ipsos polling. Starmer became prime minister at a challenging time after more than a decade of Conservative rule. Britons were grappling with a cost of living crisis, overstretched government finances and full prisons. From the start, Starmer had difficult decisions to make. For decades, Labour has tried to shake an image that it is reckless with the economy and pursues a tax-and-spend strategy, in contrast with the Conservatives, who claim to be the party of low taxation and fiscal responsibility. “Starmer’s governing project was to turn the Labour Party into the new Conservative Party,” said Oliver Eagleton, author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right. As the Conservatives rebranded themselves as a populist party appealing to the working class during Brexit under Boris Johnson, the centre ground was vacated, and Starmer “pledged to occupy that centre ground and consolidate the state”, he said. But some felt the rebranded Labour Party lacked a defined political identity and its leader the political instinct to command loyalty on the backbenches. Starmer, an Oxford University graduate born to a nurse and toolmaker, was accused of being overly cautious and indecisive despite his strong parliamentary majority. His own MPs defied him on critical votes, even forcing him into a U-turn on welfare and inheritance reforms. And the party suffered a string of resignations, push-outs or reshuffles, which did not align with his electoral pledge to end years of Conservative chaos. A further blow to Starmer’s political career was choosing Peter Mandelson, a man who had twice been fired from other Labour governments on ethical concerns, for the post of US ambassador. Starmer gave him the job despite knowing that Mandelson had a friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The prime minister said he had not known the depth of their relationship and apologised to Epstein’s victims. But to make things worse, by April it was clear that the Foreign Office had approved Mandelson’s appointment against the advice of security officials. Weeks later in local elections in May, as the Labour Party suffered great electoral losses, victorious Reform leader Nigel Farage – a firebrand populist campaigning on tougher border controls and anti-immigration rhetoric – doubled down on his promises to be as an anti-establishment alternative to Britain’s traditional parties. Starmer “came to power thinking that if the Labour Party provided stability, then everything would fix itself”, said Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London. “To combat populism, you need to prove that mainstream politics can deliver to the people, and … he hasn’t.” He said Labour “misunderstood the problem of the country – the need for bold economic reform”. To fund spending plans, Labour sought cuts elsewhere. However, Starmer’s first major misstep was restricting access to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners, a lump sum of a few hundred pounds to help with heating costs. His government eventually made a U-turn, but the damage had been done, all for the sake of a modest saving in government expenditures. In October 2024, Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s budget was widely criticised for raising taxes. Another U-turn came in summer 2025 when Starmer scaled back planned cuts to disability benefits in the face of a brewing backbench revolt. Even after his concessions, 49 Labour MPs voted against the government. As his mistakes mounted, several cabinet ministers, including Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, privately pressed him to set out a timetable for his departure. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who has made no secret of his political ambitions, quit the cabinet on May 14. Streeting did not launch a leadership challenge, but waiting in the wings was Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, nicknamed the “King of the North” by British media in an allusion to Game of Thrones. But first, Burnham needed to return to the House of Commons to be eligible for the premiership. After initially blocking Burnham from resigning as Manchester mayor to run in a by-election, Starmer relented. Burnham won a resounding victory in the constituency of Makerfield on Thursday, winning more than 50 percent of the vote and comfortably seeing off the challenge from Reform UK and its further-right rival Restore Britain. For the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs, fearful of losing their seats to Reform in the next elections, Starmer had to go, and Burnham was his obvious successor. According to Bale, Burnham “can connect with the public and appears to have a clear sense of where the country needs to go”. 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