Why is the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer so unpopular?

When Keir Starmer became prime minister in 2024, Labour had won a landslide victory and the Conservative party had suffered its worst ever defeat after 14 years of governance. 

The new PM had both an impressive legal background as former director of public prosecutions, and working-class credentials as the son of a toolmaker. In his early premiership the worst scandal that the UK media managed to dig up about him was whether or not he paid the correct amount of tax on a field that he bought for his parents’ four pet donkeys.

After the seeming moral vacuum of former prime minister Boris Johnson’s Covid-era government and the revolving door of British PMs that followed, Starmer seemed to represent something new: a sense of stability and decency that British politics hadn’t seen in some time.

But those qualities have not been enough to cement Starmer’s leadership. As of May 2026, his approval ratings are slightly above their lowest ebb, but 70 percent of the British public still think that he’s doing badly as prime minister – and just 19 percent have a positive opinion of him overall. 

Football stadiums are filled with chants insulting him and focus group descriptions of Starmer throw up words like “doormat” and “jellyfish”, the latter a throwback to a 2023 op-ed by former political rival Michael Gove, who called Starmer “transparent, spineless and swept along by any incoming tide”.

This week much of Starmer’s own party turned against him following crushing local elections that saw Labour incur hefty losses. More than 80 Labour MPs have now called for Starmer’s resignation. 

‘Effectively toxic’

Why the prime minister has become so unpopular is something of a mystery considering “the most compelling critiques of Starmer are that he is boring, lacks dynamism and has an annoying voice”, says Rob Johns, professor of politics and a specialist in public opinion at the University of Southampton.

One plausible explanation is that doggedly moderate Starmer is not suited to an era when “the polarising effect of Brexit has made centrism an especially unattractive position”, Johns adds.

Although they have not yet triggered an official leadership contest, Starmer’s own MPs now seem to see his measured leadership style as a political handicap.

“I think you are a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things however I have seen first-hand how that is not enough,” cabinet minister Jess Phillips wrote in a resignation letter she delivered on Tuesday.

She went on to accuse Starmer of stalling over plans to implement tech solutions that would prevent online child sex abuse. “This is the definition of incremental change. Nothing bold about it,” she concluded.

Disgruntled former Labour voters are also disillusioned with the lack of progress. 

Some 29 percent of voters who have defected from the party since the last election believe that it has not delivered on its promises and failed to reduce the cost of living. 

Matthew Torbitt, former Labour advisor and political commentator, told FRANCE 24, “9.7 million people voted in 2024 for change – that’s what the Labour party offered… but if you’d have been in a coma for the last two years you wouldn’t notice a difference if you woke up today.”

One of Starmer’s key election promises in 2024 was to improve public services, eroded by years of austerity after the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.

But waiting lists for healthcare remain above pre-pandemic levels with lengthy backlogs for many services while there remains widespread exasperation ​at under-resourced local government and justice services and disrepair across road networks.

Meanwhile, the global cost-of-living crisis is biting particularly hard in Britain, which has high income inequality compared to other developed nations. 

Inflation has pushed interest rates higher than in the eurozone, and high exposure to gas prices also means Britain's economy has been hit harder than others by the Iran war.

Starmer is also seen as failing to tackle the dominant political issue of illegal immigration – despite net migration figures falling – which has boosted the ratings of anti-immigration party Reform UK.

Many of these issues – the after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit, and the current impact of the Iran war – are not Starmer’s doing but impact his popularity nonetheless.

It is “quite plausible that, for various reasons, we're in such an anti-politics moment that pretty much any prime minister would be deeply unpopular”, Johns says.

Many Labour MPs now fear that Starmer has become so deeply unpopular that if he continues to lead the party he will erode any chance of its success in future elections and hand the premiership to Reform UK leader and Brexit-backer Nigel Farage.

Starmer is “effectively toxic”, Torbitt says, adding it’s time for him to “do the selfless thing and hand over to somebody else”.

‘Ambitious programme’

But the prime minister – in one of the bolder moves of his career – is so far refusing to go. 

This is perhaps because Tuesday’s challenge to his leadership came at an unusual time, just one day ahead of the annual King’s Speech during which the monarch opens parliament by reading a speech written by the government – in this case, Starmer’s – officialising its policies.

The event is one of the major set pieces of UK politics, and this year provided a chance for the chronically embattled Starmer to make good on a pledge Monday that his government  would be "better" and bolder.

In the introduction Starmer vowed to move "with greater urgency" on an "ambitious programme" to make Britain "stronger and fairer".

Proposals included deepening Britain's relationship with the European Union, fully nationalising British Steel, reforming the asylum system, lowering the voting age to 16 and cracking down on ticket touts.

It remains to be seen whether Starmer will be around to implement them – but any successor may face similar difficulties, Johns says.

“Given that the economic outlook is bleak and it's hard to see where good news is coming from, I don't think anyone would find it easy to be a popular Labour prime minister in the short or medium term.”