Keir Starmer’s legacy in British politics is already assured. No one in modern British history had managed to come to power with a massive majority and then become the least popular prime minister on record in just over a year.
As the Institute for Government’s report The Precarious State of the State underlined at the time of the last general election, whoever claimed the keys to No 10 was going to inherit a complex set of tricky challenges – creaking public services, fragile public finances, a longstanding productivity problem. The list went on.
The Labour government’s response was to dampen public expectations, blame the previous government, emphasise the existence of a financial black hole and generally sink into a funk of doom and gloom. This miserablism was never going to be a winning strategy.
