THERE'S now a growing consensus that Keir Starmer has made a mess of his first three months in power, partly due to a dogmatic insistence on demonstrating "toughness" by making lower-income people suffer to plug the fiscal black hole, and partly due to inexplicable errors of personal judgment such as the accepting of lavish freebies.
And the opinion poll evidence suggests he hasn't got away with it. At the end of July, the polling firm Opinium found that Starmer's net approval rating stood at a respectable +3, but that had declined to -6 only a couple of weeks later in mid-August, and had slumped to a dreadful -26 a few days ago, once the impact of the gifts scandal started to be felt. Polls from other companies have shown similar collapses in the popularity of both Starmer and the Government as a whole.
There's perhaps a danger of overstating Labour's predicament, because if there was another General Election tomorrow, they would probably win again due to the ongoing split in the right-wing vote. But what matters to Labour at this stage of the electoral cycle is not whether they're nominally in the lead, but whether voters are forming a positive impression of them in government. If the impression is negative, and if that can't be turned around over the coming months and years, it's likely that voters will be looking for an alternative at the next election. In other words, the seeds for a Labour defeat in 2028 or 2029 may already have been sown.
If that's the case, it's impossible to find a precedent of an incoming government that has blown it quite so speedily. Generally speaking, there's a tremendous amount of goodwill towards any new administration for the first few months at the very least, as credit is received for positive changes, while the previous government can still be blamed for anything that goes wrong.
It's not an alibi for Starmer that he started with an unwanted place in the record books after receiving the lowest popular vote for any winning party in the democratic era, because history shows that the "honeymoon effect" usually still occurs regardless of the strength of the new government's mandate. In February 1974, Labour under Harold Wilson barely had a mandate at all as they unexpectedly ousted Edward Heath's Tory government – they were well short of a Commons majority and were in second place behind the Tories in the popular vote. But within a few weeks, even many voters who had stuck with the Tories were grateful to Wilson for having resolved the miners' strike. Labour built up a substantial lead in the polls, allowing Wilson to plan for a snap election which ultimately won him a clear majority.
Of course there are many Labour-supporting commentators who refuse to accept that Starmer's mandate is modest. They believe that the Government's number of Commons seats is what matters and not the number of votes received. On that basis, the correct comparison for Starmer should be with the early months of Tony Blair's government, which had a similar scale of parliamentary majority. But it's a comparison that is nothing short of humiliating for the current Prime Minister. Three months after taking office in 1997, a Mori poll gave Blair a glowing net approval rating of + 46. It took more than three full years before Blair had anything like the kind of awful ratings Starmer is currently experiencing, and even then it was just a blip caused by a fleeting fuel crisis.
And what of other incoming governments? It's true that Mori showed Margaret Thatcher with a negative rating within around four months of taking office in 1979, but her deficit was modest and it was in line with the numbers she had previously recorded as opposition leader. She was a divisive figure both before and after being elected, but the important thing was that those who voted for her were seemingly not disappointed with what they saw in the early part of her premiership. It wasn't until 1980 that her levels of unpopularity started to look dangerous.
David Cameron had a much more prolonged honeymoon after the Tory/LibDem coalition removed Labour from office in 2010. Five months in, Ipsos Mori showed him comfortably in positive territory with a net rating of +15. He didn't become as unpopular as Starmer is now until around two years after he became Prime Minister.
So Starmer simply has no peers over the decades since widespread opinion polling started in the UK. He's raced to severe unpopularity in record time. Some might quibble that, like a lettuce before him, he's already outlasted the one-month-wonder Liz Truss, but that's not a remotely meaningful comparison because Truss did not become prime minister by winning her own personal mandate at a General Election.
The SNP must think Christmas has come early, because it probably wouldn't even have occurred to them that their main rivals might implode so soon after a landmark electoral breakthrough. Not only have the SNP's chances of winning a fifth successive term in office in 2026 improved considerably, but it's also starting to look a tad more plausible that they could even recover a majority of Scottish seats at Westminster in 2028 or 2029 – assuming Scotland isn't already an independent country by then.
