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 government, that he fell back on thinking that just not being the Conservatives would be good enough.

That is a familiar line of anti-Trump thinking from our politics over here. There was talk of Labour coming in all ready to go. Housing is a good example of this — it was the one thing they got quite a lot of good press on, as I recall, in the first couple of weeks. But actually, it looks like last year there will have been fewer houses built in Britain than in many years, so even there they didn’t have a worked-out plan about how to get the construction sector going again. Starmer had a chief of staff who was supposedly, at least in his telling of it, responsible for the planning of how to do government. And then he sacked that person within months and put somebody else in place, Morgan McSweeney, who’d had no experience of government and had essentially spent his time in internal Labour Party politics. So I think the lack of preparation is the second reason.

The third thing has to do with him struggling to make so many decisions. If you read the commentary by the journalists here, what’s coming out from people who are briefing them, it’s that he’s very incurious about policy, that he’s very passive. He doesn’t have a strong sense about what he wants to do, and this is part of the reason why he then finds it very easy to U-turn on many things.

And then the final reason — I knew I’d get to four in the end — is the fact that Labour’s majority was so large in 2024 that it disguises the fact that their share of the vote was so low.

Right, their majority was always precarious in that way to begin with.And really there wasn’t any sense in which he won over even a significant swath of the British electorate. They simply knew in their gut, in some sense, that the Conservatives couldn’t carry on in power, and that when you have a government that has to go, you vote for the opposition. And even then, many people couldn’t bring themselves to do that, hence why the percentage of the vote was so low.

So I think what’s happening in British politics is actually that there’s just a deep underlying crisis, which nobody really knows what to do about in the political class. The hope that somehow it could be different was, for perhaps one last time, projected onto the opposition party. And once it’s shown that actually they’ve got no more idea than the previous government, we enter into another stage of the crisis.

Given that, are there any leaders on the Labour bench that could do a credible job if Starmer is deposed? Is it even possible to be a decently popular prime minister right now? I think it’ll be impossible for a new Labour leader to stabilize the overall political situation because I think that there’s no evidence that any of the contenders have got a clear understanding of the depth of the crisis or a way strategically forward of dealing with it. If Labour were led by someone from what’s called the Soft Left — so someone a bit to the left of Starmer — they could probably stabilize the Labour party around that, which might make governing a little bit easier in the short term. I don’t think it would do anything to change the relationship between government and the electorate in the medium term.

I think we’re in really unknown territory here, because in some sense the way British politics is supposed to work is that the government screws up and the opposition comes in, as long as they’ve learned the lessons from the last time they screwed up. And the difficulty here is that it’s not that long since the Conservatives were in power, not much more than 18 months, and that all ended up pretty shambolically. They’ve suffered a series of defections to Reform. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that Reform could offer a competent government. Given Nigel Farage’s history, it’s quite difficult to see how he’s capable of really working with other people for any length of time. So it’s quite easy to see how you could go into the next election in the U.K, whenever it comes, and you have a discredited government, an opposition that nobody has really much confidence in, and the next opposition party being essentially fundamentally unserious.

The political crisis that we have been referring to is something that many Western democracies are experiencing. Many traditional parties, in places from France to Japan, have collapsed or weakened greatly, and right-wing populism has a foothold almost everywhere. As I understand it, in the U.K., the most important cause of this shift is an economy that’s been stagnant for a long time. Is that pretty much correct?Yeah, what’s true is that the U.K. has had a series of economic difficulties since the 2008 crash. I would actually argue that you could start to see structural economic weaknesses that are haunting the U.K. now, particularly around energy, from about 2004, 2005. You could certainly argue that in Europe, with the exception of Germany, where the crisis came later, that the Western European economies generally have struggled since the crash and that there’s been a divergence from the United States, where recovery was better. The shale boom was part of that, and tech is a different story in the U.S. than in Europe. So I think it’s certainly possible to argue — I don’t entirely buy this — but it’s possible to argue that the UK’s economic problems are comparable with other Western European countries’ economic problems.

I think what you have in the UK is the conjunction of this with a political system that is very receptive to drama. And then not only the U.K.’s relationship with the European Union coming to a head, but the internal structure of the United Kingdom coming to a head in 2014 with the referendum on Scottish independence…if you start this political story in 2014 with that referendum, we’re now into the 12th year really of big political questions being thrown at the UK system of government, and there not really being answers.

The Labour Party goes back a long time, and the Tories are one of the oldest political parties in the world. Has there ever been a period in modern British politics when they were both so weak at the same time? I don’t think so. If you go back to the period when there was a big or significant shift away in terms of the percentage of the vote each of the parties got, it would be the 1970s, when you had a rise in support for the Liberal Party, the rise of the Scottish Nationalists, and Plaid Cymru in Wales. But even then, both parties were still capable of being governing parties. The Conservatives were in office from ‘70 to ‘74 and then back again in ‘79, and Labour from ‘74 to ‘79. Those governments were unpopular at times, very unpopular at times, but I don’t think there’s any point in which you would really say that it was  a systemic crisis of the two-party system. And that’s the only point of comparison I think we could really make. So I think it’s hard to find anything where you can say that the two parties were in crisis at the same time. Usually when one’s been in crisis, the other one has been strong. And now we’re in a territory where in some sense many voters regard neither of the parties as serious parties.

Reform, led by Farage, is leading pretty much every general election poll — even if there may not be an election for three years, and, as you said, he would probably struggle to build a coalition. One thing I don’t get is that Farage was one of the signature faces of Brexit, which is really unpopular these days. Study after study shows that it did significant damage to the economy with very little upside. So why has Farage seemingly paid no penalty for that? The question of the unpopularity of Brexit is quite complicated in the sense that clearly having left the European Union commands nowhere near majority support any longer. But at the same time, there’s no evidence of a really strong “rejoin” movement. So in that sense, I think Brexit has been a bit neutralized as a political question. That’s not to say there aren’t, as you say, important consequences to the United Kingdom having left. I think we are going to see at the next election, whenever it comes, that the Labour Party will try to position itself as being pro-European, even to the point of saying we should rejoin the customs union or the single market. I don’t think it will go so far as to say we should rejoin the European Union. I think the direction of travel will be to contest the game, perhaps not actually about membership, but actually essentially around what will be framed as pro-European versus anti-European.

The Labour strategists think that’s what they should do, because they do think Farage is the face of Brexit, and that’s a weakness where Reform is concerned. But the thing about Reform is that in some sense, it isn’t really about Farage. It’s just about having another political space in which unhappy voters can project their desire for something different.

Former U.S. Ambassador Peter Mandelson recently resigned from the Labour Party, and was arrested shortly after, over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer has been criticized for knowing about some of these ties and appointing Mandelson at the beginning of his term anyway. But it seemed a little extreme for Labour figures to demand Starmer’s resignation. Did that only happen because Starmer is so weak right now, and people are looking for any kind of excuse to get rid of him? Or is the Epstein thing actually a bigger deal there than here?I think the Epstein thing is being seen as a pretty big deal here. On the specific question of Starmer and Mandelson, part of the reason why he was under so much pressure about it is that there’s a common understanding among the media class, and perhaps even many voters have absorbed it, that Starmer is a weak prime minister who was the creature of his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, before he resigned. And that McSweeney was a creature of Mandelson, which if you put it together, makes Starmer a creature of Mandelson. So I think that there was a general sense in which it isn’t just a question of him appointing Mandelson to the ambassadorship, but that it was reflective of something about Starmer himself.

It’s also true that if you look back to the time when the Epstein story first broke, Mandelson’s name has always been quite to the fore here. Perhaps not quite as much to the fore as the former Prince Andrew, but probably only second to him.

The Andrew mess doesn’t really affect electoral politics, right? Correct me if I’m wrong.All I would say there is that a crisis for the monarchy adds to the sense of overall crisis that’s permeating things here.

One place where Starmer has been pretty successful is his relationship with Trump, which he has been careful about cultivating. Trump did not enact punishing tariffs on the UK and does not insult the entire country constantly, though that’s in part because he has an affection for the Royal Family. But has this brought Starmer any goodwill whatsoever, or is it contributing to the sense that he’s weak, since he has done some kowtowing to Trump? Do people want more defiance? What you can see actually, actually is that over the last couple of months, and perhaps even particularly now this last week, that Starmer has tried to be more assertive. He was more critical than he’d been before over Greenland. But there’s now this situation, at least as it’s been reported here, that Starmer doesn’t want Trump to use a British airbase for any attack on Iran.

That’s the Chagos Islands, correct? Which Starmer also wants to give to Mauritius, a deal Trump has lambasted.Yeah. I think that as he’s been in more trouble, Starmer has seen that there’s a domestic upside to being more critical. Whether that’s a serious strategy for dealing with Donald Trump is a whole other proposition.

And there’s no doubt that Trump has been turning the pressure up on the Chagos Island issue of late. It has turned into quite a major headache for Starmer. I suspect Trump will use that to try to keep Starmer in line.

Trump would probably prefer to have Farage in there, right? Yeah, it’d be interesting to know what he actually makes of Farage, though. I can imagine him actually being somewhat dismissive.

Right, Farage may be too worshipful of Trump. He doesn’t always like that. But either way, I assume Trump will not feel terrible about making Starmer’s life even harder than it already is. No, I’m sure he won’t.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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