At the close of last year, Keir Starmer quipped to journalists that his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was “the ghost of Christmas future” arriving with the latest polling data. It was a decent joke – and received as such – but it had a disorienting effect. Gallows humour is normally the preserve of midterm prime ministers – Gordon Brown circa 2009 – not new ones. And yet here was Starmer, seven months after a landslide victory, condemned to mock his own unpopularity.
Matters have not improved since. A YouGov poll this week put Reform ahead of Labour for the first time – by 25 per cent to 24 per cent – as rival pollster Find Out Now previously had. Were a general election held today, headlines routinely declare, Labour would lose its majority.
To this there is an easy riposte: there is not an election today. After years of hyperactivity, “chaos junkies” – as one Labour aide calls them – must adjust to the business of stable government. But polling still matters: it provides a snapshot of the national mood and a guide to how it may shift. It can make governments more risk-averse (“we can’t afford to lose any more”) or more risk-prone (“we’ve got nothing to lose”).
And the reasons for unpopularity matter too. Glance at More in Common’s polling and it becomes clear that not all policies are created equal. Those in the “danger zone” – highly unpopular and highly salient – include the winter fuel payment cuts, the prisoner early-release scheme, higher inheritance tax on farmland, the rise in bus fares and the National Insurance increase. (To this list, cabinet ministers fear, you will soon be able to add the Chagos deal.)
These are the “tough decisions” that ministers so often speak of. But tougher ones may lie ahead. Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, remember, was expansionary – it gave more than it took away (even after accounting for tax rises). Public spending was increased by £72bn and public-sector pay by £9.4bn (the biggest real-terms rise since the last Labour government).
But the risk is of a British version of François Mitterrand’s “tournant de la rigueur” (“austerity turn”) – which saw the French Socialist president forced to impose spending cuts and tax rises. Though UK bond yields have fallen in recent weeks, economists still warn that Reeves may breach her fiscal rules without intervention.
Unless growth improves, the Chancellor will struggle to deliver another Budget as generous as her first. But how much political benefit has Labour seen from it? Not enough, MPs fear.
Labour strategists are phlegmatic about the party’s woes (noting that Ed Miliband’s Labour led the Tories in 2011). There is precedent for governing parties to recover, and they insist they have a plan. Voters who came to disdain the short-term populism of Starmer’s Tory predecessors, will eventually reward his patient focus on delivery. One loyal MP echoes Apple founder Steve Jobs’ old mantra: “If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader, sell ice cream.”
But the threat to Labour is becoming clearer. Before the election, the pollster James Kanagasooriam coined the term “sandcastle politics” to describe coalitions that are impressive but liable to be swept away.
For Starmer, YouGov’s poll offers a nightmarish vision of how that could happen: 11 per cent of Labour’s 2024 voters have defected to the Liberal Democrats, 8 per cent to Reform, 6 per cent to the Greens, 4 per cent to the Tories and 2 per cent to the SNP. As with the fractured “Boris coalition”, the risk is that Labour loses votes to everyone, everywhere, all at once. Rather than owning the common ground, Starmer could prove too progressive for conservatives and too conservative for progressives.
Will a divided right save Labour? Not necessarily. Even without a Reform-Tory pact, the risk is that voters automatically back the strongest option – a mirror image of the progressive alliance that undid the Tories.
Starmer has, of course, been here before. In 2021, predicting that he would become prime minister was one of the most unfashionable opinions in Westminster. Labour’s hope is that his fortunes in government will replicate those in opposition: condemnation before vindication. But the early signs are ominous.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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