Prime Minister Keir Starmer had the rare distinction of starting his term with poor personal ratings, which have only worsened over time. But what’s unique is that most of Starmer’s supporters have abandoned him.
At the time of writing, many Labour MPs are plotting his downfall. The problem is that there isn’t an obvious candidate to succeed Starmer.
The next big test for his government will come in the May local elections, which could be the end of the line for the prime minister.
To understand Starmer’s failure as a leader, we have to revisit the 2024 general election. Westminster is full of political journalists who find his rapid descent baffling.
Most of them cheered Labour’s march to victory, praising the great leader’s instincts and his forensic performance in Parliament. Reality has been harsh for the Starmerites.
The illusion of the human rights lawyer with the rockabilly hairdo has evaporated, along with the fantasy that the election would herald a return to the halcyon days of 1997.
This book started as a pre-election podcast diary before becoming a campaign journal. We begin in January 2024 and continue through the election, when the podcast became a weekly series.
Tories Are Dead: 2024 UK Election Diary charts the run-up to the 2024 general election and the twists and turns of the campaign trail to election day on 4 July.
The backstory of Tory misrule is explored throughout. All of this is necessary to understand where we are today.
The Starmerites made numerous extravagant claims about their messiah. They said he would at least herald a decade of Labour government. Some believed he would rejoin the EU and implement proportional representation.
Others would defend anything he did because he’s electable, apparently. We’ve got to win, and any crime or misdeed can be forgiven. The silence from these people today is profound.
These recovering Starmer fans would no doubt have accused me of being a bitter Corbynite in July 2024. But the critique of Starmer in this book has largely been vindicated.
Yes, Labour won a landslide majority, but its victory was based on the lowest vote share of any government in modern history. Now, Reform UK’s best polls suggest the far-right party may surpass this feat with huge gains in seats, despite a smaller vote share than Labour.
The Tories lost over 250 seats in the election, primarily because three prime ministers had destroyed the goodwill its voters had invested in the party to “get Brexit done”.
Meanwhile, many progressive voters had been waiting for 14 long, agonising years, through austerity, the Brexit years, the pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis. The country was crying out for change in 2024.
Instead, the country saw Starmer and Rachel Reeves embark on a new era of permanent austerity. Labour bitterly resisted pressure to introduce the two-child benefit cap, and then tried to cut the winter fuel allowance for 10 million pensioners.
This was after the racist riots sparked by the horrific Southport child murders in the summer. Mobs of outraged people, including a large far-right contingent, attacked hotels and mosques, looted shops, and even set up checkpoints to stop non-white drivers in one instance.
Reform UK has positioned itself to benefit substantially from the rise of anti-migrant sentiment. Starmer has fanned the flames since he entered 10 Downing Street, and his government continues to try to outdo Reform at its own game.
Of course, Nigel Farage appears throughout the book. He is even more relevant today as a possible contender for prime minister. But, like Starmer, he may be doomed to fail his own base and leave the country in tatters.
Today, the UK looks even more depressed than it was before Labour took power. The country is gripped by a malaise unseen since the worst days of the 1970s, when stagflation, IRA bombings and industrial unrest gripped the nation.
This period of misrule and dysfunction under the Tories and Labour ended with a right-wing realignment orchestrated by Margaret Thatcher. Now the country is long past the height of the neoliberal era, when it at least delivered growth.
Once again, Britain is crying out for change, but whether the country can get the change it needs is far from certain. Political leadership is severely lacking, with the Westminster talent pool reaching new lows.
What really destroyed the Conservatives was a loss of economic credibility. The party failed to insulate its base from the harsh consequences of its policy failures. Lockdowns generated a massive surge in inflation, hitting savers hard.
The COVID-19 pandemic devastated Britain and left the country in a worse position than ever after a decade of austerity. Over 250,000 people died during the pandemic on top of 148,000 deaths due to spending cuts since 2010, according to the British Medical Journal.
Despite this, Boris Johnson is now loathed by many of his former admirers for relaxing visa rules to allow an influx of students and care workers into the UK. Nevertheless, many right-wingers supported him throughout these decisions at the time.
Then Liz Truss delivered a financial shock, almost tanking the pound and pensions. The Bank of England hiked interest rates and hit the average mortgage holder hard, too.
Rishi Sunak was brought in as a “safe pair of hands”, but his reign was doomed from the start. Sunak couldn’t play the populist game and ran into a series of obstacles during his brief tenure.
The Tories’ well-earned defeat might end up being a soft version of the fate awaiting Labour at the next election. The Conservative Party receives more than its fair share of ire in this book, but it’s really about the undeserved victory of Starmer and what it means for the country.
This is a book about the predictable failure of the Starmer project, just as much as it is about Tory misrule and the breakdown of British democracy. As the title suggests, the Tories may be dead, but Labour is next.
Photograph courtesy of Number 10. Published under a Creative Commons license.
