Britain’s cautious prime minister faces a growing public backlash

Keir Starmer’s downfall is easy to cast as the cautionary tale of a prime minister who let a commanding Commons majority slip through his fingers.

The arithmetic seems to support that view. Only 22 months ago, Mr Starmer secured 411 seats — Labour’s third-strongest performance on record and its best outcome since Tony Blair’s second landslide in 2001.

Judged on seat totals alone, the argument that he wasted a huge advantage carries obvious force.

Yet that imposing majority never amounted to an equally imposing public mandate.

Labour actually won fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn managed in both of his general election campaigns — in 2017 and again in 2019.

What transformed that relatively modest showing into a sweeping parliamentary victory was Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

The Conservatives had fallen apart.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party was carving up the right-wing vote. Tactical voting was hurting the Tories from the left. And in constituency after constituency, Labour edged over the line, taking a third of its seats with margins below 10%.

That does not diminish Labour’s achievement. The party executed an exceptionally disciplined ground campaign, finely tuned to the fractured electorate in front of it.

Keir Starmer led Labour to victory in 2024 taking 412 seats with a vote share of 33.7%

But an efficient electoral machine is not the same as a genuine mandate.

In the end, Mr Starmer entered Downing Street not because voters had embraced him warmly, but because the Tories had imploded and no convincing alternative stood in front of the country.

The landslide was always as much a story about the electoral system that produced it as it was about Mr Starmer himself.

His own offer to voters, in July 2024, was clear: he ran as the anti-Jeremy Corbyn — the lawyer, the technocrat, the careful operator who would restore “grown-up government” after years of Conservative disorder.

He was defined, in other words, more by contrast than by a vivid political identity of his own.

In almost two years in office, Mr Starmer has governed much as he campaigned — carefully, deliberately and with the controlled precision of the former prosecutor he used to be.

Even on Monday, during the “reset” speech intended to rescue his premiership, the prime minister announced he was nationalising British Steel — exactly the kind of muscular intervention Labour supporters had long demanded.

“This,” he said, “is what an activist state looks like”.

Yet in the next breath he stressed that the move would remain “subject to a public interest test”, puncturing the force of his own declaration by steering attention back to process and procedure.

That pattern has come to define his time in office.

For the better part of two years, aides have tried to coax a different tone out of him — and failed.

The figure now occupying Downing Street is, essentially, the same man who first crossed its threshold in July 2024.

That is the heart of the problem. The public did not give him power out of any deep affection for caution. It did so because it had run out of patience with chaos.

Britain may well have accepted a prime minister who was quiet, decent and methodical — provided he produced results.

But the cost of living crisis has not lifted. The National Health Service remains on its knees. Housing is still out of reach for many. Public services continue to strain under pressure.

Mr Starmer’s answer has been incrementalism — limited adjustments, modest reforms, pilot programmes and working groups.

The same meticulous style that was meant to prove his seriousness has instead left him looking unequal to a grave political moment.

At the same time, disorder has hardly disappeared.

His decision to cut the winter fuel allowance turned Labour into a political liability in constituencies the party could ill afford to forfeit.

His so-called “island of strangers” speech on immigration, which warned that migration could erode the country’s identity, enraged the Labour left.

Most damaging of all, his appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington collapsed into controversy when Mandelson’s correspondence with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein entered the public domain.

The implied bargain was restraint in return for competence. Increasingly, the country believes it received neither.

That frustration is not unique to Britain. Across the West, voters have spent much of the past decade turning against the cautious, “trust the experts” brand of technocratic centrism that took shape after the 2008 financial crisis.

Keir Starmer, in many ways, is simply the belated and somewhat threadbare British inheritor of that politics.

Which is why the field forming to succeed him says so much.

Keir Starmer blocked Andy Burnham from running in a February bye-election

Andy Burnham has spent the last decade cultivating his role as the unapologetic “King of the North” — taking on prime ministers directly, speaking up for his region in blunt terms, and insisting that Westminster politics no longer functions.

Angela Rayner, shaped by poverty, has never sought to soften or hide her convictions, her politics or her instincts.

Even Wes Streeting — the contender most reminiscent of Tony Blair — handed in his resignation letter on Thursday not as an exercise in managerial positioning, but as a matter of conscience.

None of them is a cautious technocrat. None is campaigning on stability. None is asking simply to administer the system.

In sharply different ways, all of them are running against the very politics Mr Starmer has come to represent.