It’s the world darts championships on the first day of the year, and a well-lubricated early-afternoon audience at London’s Alexandra Palace is belting out one of the more recent additions to its songbook. Up on the stage, the then world No 20, Ryan Searle, briefly extracts himself from his quarter-final match to encourage the crowd, conducting it with his hands and briefly joining in a chorus of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”.
And the surreal part of all this is that from Searle’s gesture alone, you could scarcely guess what his own politics might be. Was he condemning Starmer from the nativist right or from the progressive left? Pro-farmer or pro-Palestine? Does he think the government’s reforms on workers’ rights go too far or not far enough? Perhaps Searle’s protest might even have come from the Burnhamite centre, less an ideological objection and more an implicit criticism of messaging and delivery.
The hideous beauty of British politics in 2026 is that we have no idea. You think Keir Starmer’s a wanker? Back of the queue’s that way, mate. And of course there is a rich irony in the fact that Starmer took office with the explicit aim of healing our divisions and bringing the country together, rendering this one of the very few election pledges he has actually managed to keep.
His approval ratings, which began to go into freefall from pretty much the moment he moved into Downing Street, have dropped below 20%. A YouGov poll last week found that he was more disliked by Britons than Benjamin Netanyahu or Hamas. At the weekend a far-right march against Starmer’s government in Bristol was met with a leftwing counter-protest bearing the slogan “We hate Keir Starmer more than you”.
Meanwhile the song itself has become a kind of standard, the soundtrack to our lives, perhaps even a unifying balm in troubled times. As well as the darts, you hear it at football grounds up and down the country, in nightclubs at 2am, at music festivals, pretty much anywhere large groups of young people congregate in a public place. In a way it has become this generation’s Ghost Town, its Get Lucky, its Candle in the Wind 1997. Goodbye, England’s wanker.
There have of course been other useless prime ministers in our time: prime ministers who have started wars, killed thousands through neglect or cruelty, plunged millions into poverty, been duplicitous or corrupt, who have been turfed out in disgrace. But with the brief exception of Liz Truss, even the most divisive of them took years to become the focal point of mass rage. Starmer has managed to hit the sweet spot within barely a year. People genuinely, viscerally loathe this guy. Why him? Why now? And why like this?
Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.
Clearly there is a hedonistic, nihilistic element to much of the sloganeering: a performative alpha masculinity that seems to have bled over from far-right spaces, via the sporting arena, into mainstream culture. Travelling football fans up and down the country slap “MORE GEAR LESS KEIR” stickers on trains, benches and lamp-posts. And for these guys Starmer functions as basically the polar opposite of cocaine: sober, quiet, boring, right on, emotionally austere and medically incapable of banter.
