Prime Minister Keir Starmer entered office in 2024 on the heels of a decisive Labour election victory, as his party swept into power for the first time since 2010. Just over a year and a half later, Starmer’s tenure is already in shambles. His leadership has been marked by stagnancy and indecisiveness, with Starmer becoming known for backtracking on politically difficult decisions involving welfare, property taxes, immigration, and more. Key staffers have resigned or been fired. Recently, the Epstein scandal has dogged Starmer as well; Peter Mandelson, his first ambassador to the U.S., was arrested this week on suspicion of passing classified information to the disgraced financier, and some in Starmer’s own party called for his resignation over appointing Mandelson in the first place. (The scandal has already claimed Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.) In polls, Labour continues to lose ground to parties on the left, like the Greens, and, more ominously, to those on the hard right, most notably Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party, which is now the most popular in the country. The prime minister’s approval rating sounds south of 20 percent. The saving grace for Labour is that they don’t need to call another general election until 2029

Starmer’s position is grim, but familiar. Since Brexit, which Britons approved in a referendum almost a decade ago, the U.K. has cycled through five prime ministers, including Starmer, none of whom have yet lasted much more than three years, and none of whom achieved enduring popularity. (Remember Liz Truss?) In some ways, the country’s political chaos has echoed other Western countries in recent years. But the U.K. is in its own particular kind of slump. To better understand why Starmer is quite so embattled and why his successors may not fare much better, I spoke with Helen Thompson, a longtime Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University who frequently writes and comments about British politics.

Keir Starmer has recently faced several calls to resign from purported allies. His approval rating is dismal. Do you think he’s even going to last the year? Is there any chance to right this ship?I think it’s over for him. I think it’s actually been over for him for a while. It’s just really a question of timing from the point of view of somebody in the Labour Party who is capable of challenging him directly, because the means by which that has to be done is quite complicated. There have to be 81 members of Parliament who are willing to back that candidate — it’s not enough to have 81 people who say we would like a new leader. They have to unite behind somebody. And for different reasons, the front-runners have difficulties themselves at the moment, and I think that’s the only thing keeping Starmer in place. It’s pretty clear that except for a very few loyalists, most people in the Parliamentary party have come to the conclusion that he’s not fit to be prime minister. Clearly part of the reason they think that is because he’s so unpopular. But from what I sense, there’s also some dismay about his limitations as a prime minister that are independent, in a way, of his unpopularity.

When Starmer was campaigning, his whole appeal was that he was boring but competent — that he would be good at the nuts and bolts of government, even if he lacked flash. Instead, he seems to be exactly the opposite. Is his standing so dismal because of something he has actually done or more because of the perception that he’s weak and indecisive?I think there’s probably at least three different things going on. The first is that he was actually a very inexperienced politician. He only went into politics, in terms of running for office, in 2015. He’d had a career prior to that as a lawyer and then as director of public prosecutions. So he hadn’t shown, or hadn’t had the need to show, any political talent in what he’d done for most of his adult life. I think it would be wrong to think that the skills of a lawyer just transfer into that of a politician, particularly in a party like the Labour Party, which has long been internally divided and full of persistent factional warfare. Somebody has to find their way around that and be particularly competent to do it.

The second thing is I think that he didn’t have a clear substantive plan for........

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