Starmer needs to tell a better Christmas story about Labour

Editorial: If Labour is to avoid catastrophe in the May local elections, the prime minister and his cabinet need to pull together and deliver both action and good news

In his Christmas message to the nation, Sir Keir Starmer asks people to “get back in touch with those who might find the time of year difficult. Check in on a friend or a relative who you haven’t heard from for a while. Reach out. It can make a huge difference.”

Admirable sentiments. However, it seems that many of those who voted to put him in power at the last general election might quite like the prime minister to also get back in touch with them, as they are finding life under a Labour government more difficult than they hoped, as indeed is Sir Keir himself.

The results of the latest polling by The Independent into the standing of the prime minister and his government make for grim reading. He knows he is unpopular, but perhaps not quite how badly disillusioned those who placed their faith in him a year and a half ago now feel. About four in 10 of those who voted Labour in July 2024 say the party would do better at the ballot box with a new leader, with not much more than one in 10 keeping faith with Sir Keir.

The implications of such data are disturbing for the prime minister, because it suggests that if he does survive as leader until 2027, with an election nearing, he and his party will become even more disliked, and a truly apocalyptic scenario begins to crystallise. At that point, the party might well panic or be frozen in a state of stasis at the dire situation. Either case might push their support even lower. Sir Keir’s personal ratings were never that stellar, even in opposition, while his Commons landslide greatly flattered the 34 per cent of the vote he received.

Still, it has been a historic decline, and it may not be over. Even though the Labour government’s honeymoon was astonishingly brief – curtailed by the cuts to the old age winter fuel allowance – at this point last year, Labour still led in the polls. At that point, Sir Keir’s party was on almost 30 per cent support in the opinion polls, ahead of the Conservatives and Reform, and about double the support reshuffled by the Greens.

Since then, of course, much has changed for the worse for the prime minister. He has lost two of the more significant personalities in his orbit – his deputy Angela Rayner and the short-lived Peter Mandelson in Washington – as well as suffering a backbench revolt on welfare reform that put the parliamentary party in the driving seat, and a succession of policy U-turns, the last only arriving after parliament had shut down for the duration.

Retreating on the so-called family farm tax may have been the right thing to do, but the timing looked strangely suspicious. It was, after all, “good news”, so why try to bury it under Christmastide? More than anything, though, it has been economic policy and the shambolic handling of the 2025 Budget that has shaken confidence in the competence of Sir Keir and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves. They, especially, spent years deriding Conservative ministers for “chaos and confusion” only to find themselves at times rivalling Liz Truss for messiness (though she remains the benchmark for cringe-inducing failure).

In 2026, things should improve as far as the economy is concerned – if only because, with luck, there will be no more major tax hikes as was the case in 2024 and 2025. Yet that is very much like the old saying about how you feel better when you’ve stopped banging your head against a wall. Growth will still be minimal, and living standards stagnant, while the genuine reforms and improvements in the public services, especially the NHS, are still to show up fully, and are endangered by industrial action by resident doctors and others.

So next year will be tough, and Sir Keir will almost certainly face some dismal results at the local, Scottish and Welsh elections in May. Sir Keir’s leadership will come under even more pressure. Yet the man Boris Johnson used to call “a useless bollard” has a certain stoic quality that may help him see things through. He is also greatly helped by the fact that his internal opponents are so disparate, with none in a clear position to be confident of making a challenge and then winning a leadership election.

They are also divided. Shabana Mahmood and Wes Streeting might represent a more convincing version of Starmerism, whatever that means, but that is not what the “soft Left” Labour Party of the 2020s desires. They’d much rather have Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner or, quite unexpectedly, Lucy Powell, the deputy leader of the party. It is not entirely clear how any of them might catapult Labour back to popularity.

The problem is that the more socialist alternatives to Sir Keir might alienate as much centrist or Reform-inclined support in the electorate as win back those who’ve defected to the charismatic Zack Polanski and his reddish-tinted Greens. On the other hand, replacing Sir Keir with Ms Mahmood or Mr Streeting would make little difference in policy terms, even if presentation would probably be better. And, of course, none of the candidates has access to a magic money tree. The rivals don’t seem obviously ready to plot together to get rid of Sir Keir, nor to work harmoniously in a Mark Two Labour administration. Such divisions might even make matters worse.

The fundamental fact is that the unfavourable economic and demographic trends that have made life so challenging for the prime minister and his chancellor will not evaporate just because, say, an audibly working-class northerner is in charge.

It would be better all round if, in the middle years of this administration’s first (or only) term, Sir Keir could find his voice and articulate the narrative that has been so glaringly lacking for so long. It’s later than the prime minister seems to think.