There is a particular cruelty in falling from a height you were specifically built for. Keir Starmer entered Downing Street in July 2024 as something close to the anti-Boris: a former Director of Public Prosecutions, knighted for public service, methodical where his predecessors were chaotic, sober where they were theatrical. After years of Conservative disintegration – four prime ministers in as many years, Partygate, the Truss budget catastrophe – the public had been promised that competence was back. Less than two years later, Starmer resigned on 22 June 2026, regarded even by his opponents as a decent man, hardworking and courteous, and yet having become the most disliked British prime minister since modern political polling began.

The BBC’s post-resignation analysis called it ‘one of the shortest honeymoon periods in British political history.’ The diagnosis was sharp: shortly after becoming prime minister, Starmer boasted ‘that there would never be such a thing as Starmerism.’ But what he saw as a lack of ideological baggage ultimately translated – in the eyes of the public and many within his own party – to a perception that the prime minister ‘was, simply, not very good at politics.’

This is the central paradox of Starmerism. His credentials were impeccable; his politics were absent. He was, in the words of one analyst, a man who ‘arrived for a career in politics unprepared for what a career in politics actually means.’ The legal mind that had prosecuted terrorism and organised crime proved ill-suited to the different demands of democratic leadership. Because Starmer entered politics in his 50s, after a successful law career, he lacked the ‘political radar’ to spot potential booby traps. This deficit became his defining vulnerability. 

The policy failures were only a part of his downfall. His government’s early decision to scrap winter fuel payments for pensioners was highly unpopular with citizens and among his own MPs. A series of U-turns followed – on disability benefit cuts in 2025, eventually on the pension payments themselves – that gave the impression of a government that neither knew what it believed nor how to hold a line. As John Curtice, the UK’s most respected pollster, put it: ‘He did not define what he believed in and what the Labour Party believed in. He does not have a narrative, a story on what his long-term objectives are… no sense of direction.’ 

The Mandelson scandal crystallised everything. Choosing Peter Mandelson – a man who had twice been fired from other Labour governments on ethical concerns – for the post of US ambassador, despite knowing of his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, proved a catastrophic lapse of judgement. Starmer’s subsequent claim that he had not known the full depth of the relationship, followed by revelations that security officials had recommended against the appointment and been overruled, destroyed the one thing he had to sell: trustworthiness. A YouGov poll in January 2026 found that 75% of people had an unfavourable opinion of him, a net favourability rating of -57, only matched by Liz Truss. 

The structural problem, though, ran deeper than any single scandal. Labour won a huge majority in Parliament but was backed by only 34% of voters – and many of those appeared motivated by anger at the Conservatives rather than enthusiasm for Labour. Starmer inherited a wide but shallow mandate, and he never broadened it. By September 2025, roughly two-thirds of people believed the Labour party was out of touch, unclear of what they stood for, weak, and untrustworthy. Reform UK, feeding on exactly that vacuum, made significant gains in the local elections in May 2026, while Labour lost nearly 1,500 council seats. 

The irony is that Starmer’s selling point – managerial sobriety, no-drama governance – became, in practice, its own form of chaos. His government was ‘the antithesis of what he said he was going to be about.’ He had promised stability and delivered multiple scandals; he had promised competence in government and delivered U-turns.

Britain will now have its seventh prime minister in ten years. Starmer’s tragedy is that he may have been the wrong kind of adequate. A supremely capable lawyer, a man of obvious integrity, and a genuinely poor politician – the gap between those things proved fatal. He was, on paper, everything the country needed. On the floor of reality, he could never quite make it count.