Keir Starmer has resigned as Labour leader and, in due course, stepped down as the UK’s prime minister. Despite repeated vows to stay on, the party rout triggered by Andy Burnham’s decisive Makerfield by-election victory pushed pressure on him beyond endurance. He becomes the sixth British prime minister to leave office in a decade.
The immediate cause was a clear collapse of support within Labour and his cabinet, exposed in private conversations over a tense weekend. Starmer sought a calmer exit than the chaotic tumbles that ended the tenures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, aiming for an orderly handover “with good grace.” Even so, his emotional farewell made plain he accepts responsibility for a premiership that fell short of its ambitions.
Starmer entered Downing Street with unusually weak public backing. On the eve of the 2024 general election his net satisfaction rating was about minus 21 — a historic low for an incoming prime minister. Only around 31% said they were satisfied with his performance while roughly 52% were dissatisfied. Yet recent British politics, distorted by Brexit-era realignments and turbulent party fortunes, has produced similarly grim numbers for other leaders: Rishi Sunak, for example, campaigned with a sharply negative favourability score.
Many expected a post-election “honeymoon” for Starmer. Historically, the office of prime minister has conferred a popularity boost: Tony Blair’s ratings rocketed after 1997, and David Cameron enjoyed a jump after forming the coalition in 2010. Starmer did get a modest lift — polls showed him near break-even soon after the 2024 victory — but the bounce was shallow and short-lived. Instead of sustained public enthusiasm, his ratings lingered around neutrality before turning downward again.
That fragility was striking considering the size of his parliamentary majority. Majorities can mask vulnerability: Boris Johnson once presided over claims of a “decade of dominance” only to be ousted barely three years later. The structural assumption that a big majority guarantees longevity proved misleading.
The pattern of Starmer’s decline echoes Jeremy Corbyn’s fall in several respects. Corbyn’s popularity plunged between 2017 and 2019, and his broad but brittle coalition collapsed under pressure over Brexit. Starmer’s rise and decline unfolded over a comparable timespan and for reasons that cut across Labour’s internal divides.
In both periods, Labour’s electoral advantage owed less to overwhelming public enthusiasm for the party and more to voters’ rejection of the incumbent administration. The 2024 victory has been described as a “loveless landslide”: Labour secured around 64% of seats on only about 34% of the vote, the smallest vote share ever for a majority government in modern times. That kind of mandate is inherently unstable.
Once in office, Labour found its support squeezed from both sides. On one flank, Reform UK chipped away at Labour’s vote in some post-industrial areas; on the other, the Greens and pro-Gaza independents appealed to urban progressive voters. The Greens increased their parliamentary presence significantly in 2024 and independent challengers scored surprising wins in traditional Labour strongholds.
Those pressures translated into tangible electoral setbacks while in government: byelection defeats to Reform UK and the Greens, poor local election showings in England, and an inability to make major inroads against a weakened but entrenched Scottish National Party. The Makerfield result was the tipping point, but it was part of a pattern of losses and slippage.
The wider context helps explain why. The Brexit referendum, held almost exactly a decade before Starmer’s resignation, reshaped British politics. The referendum didn’t just settle an institutional question; it reconfigured voters into broadly polarized blocs tied to identity and Brexit stance. As political analysts have observed, British politics now resembles two-bloc polarisation: voters cluster into competing identity-based camps where Brexit position remains a key dividing line, even when the issue is not front-and-centre.
Those blocs are internally fragmented. Parties and leaders attempt to hold together coalitions of interests and identities that only intermittently align. When a unifying theme fades or when new forces attract disaffected voters, the coalition can dissolve quickly. Leaders such as Starmer (and previously Corbyn) must manage sandcastle-like coalitions that can be washed away by shifting tides — whether a surge from the populist right, a rise in the Greens, or local controversies.
Starmer’s resignation is therefore both personal and structural: he bore the immediate political costs, but his fall also underlines the deeper instability in contemporary British politics. Electoral majorities look more precarious, party coalitions more brittle, and leadership turnover more frequent. Until the underlying polarised blocs and their internal fractures are reconciled or realigned, Britain’s premiership carousel looks likely to keep turning.
Nicholas Dickinson is a lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter. This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
