I hope he enjoyed it while it lasted. From being promisingly positive when he moved into Number 10, Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings have soured into the unpleasantly negative. Disapproval of the government as a whole is also sharply up. The surprise is that anyone’s surprised that the Labour honeymoon has been so short.
It was an Anyone But The Conservatives election back in July. Labour won it by being the most preferred of the Anyones and secured its victory with a mammoth parliamentary majority because its campaign was very well targeted and support was efficiently distributed. But it was already clear on results night that the Starmer landslide was a freakish one. Labour’s vote share was just 34%, the lowest since 1945 for any party winning a parliamentary majority. Factoring in the turnout, the proportion of the adult population who crossed the Labour box was a measly 1 in 5. So it is not accurate to say that the country has already fallen out of love with Labour; the country was never in love with Labour in the first place.
