Keir Starmer’s popularity delusion

All year Keir Starmer has been using a reassuring phrase about his inevitable Downing Street tenure in a bid to calm the nerves of those not certain they were keen on it. He debuted it in January, when the Labour leader promised to bring forth ‘a politics that treads more lightly on all our lives’. Starmer used a similar line on the steps of Downing Street on July 5, after becoming Prime Minister, when he pledged to ‘tread more lightly on your lives and unite our country’.

This suggested that he understood the limitations of his ‘loveless landslide’, gained on a sub-34 per cent vote share in a low-turnout election largely thanks to quirks in the electoral system and the obvious exhaustion of the previous governing party. But the first eight weeks of Starmerite rule have delivered the very opposite.