Commentators were already saying Keir Starmer had to go before Labour’s thumping in last week’s local elections, and this week the pressure turned louder. They called him the most incompetent prime minister of their lifetime and said things could not go on like this.
The attack has a familiar ring in British politics. It is the same voice that once greeted Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, each wrapped in the hope that replacing the person at the top would somehow fix the country beneath them. In this latest round, the criticism landed on Starmer just months after supporters on the left and centre had been celebrating his arrival as the moment the grown-ups were back in the room.
That mood did not come from nowhere. After Starmer’s election victory, supporters who had spent years arguing over competence and seriousness talked as if calm government had finally returned. One of them summed it up with the sort of line that sounds reassuring until the next crisis arrives: “Isn’t it nice that things are calm and professional again?” But the feeling did not last. The same people who had welcomed him as a reset later insisted that Britain once again needed a change of prime minister.
The pattern is not new. In 2015, Ed Miliband was roundly rejected as a candidate for prime minister. Two years later, May’s snap election was meant to deliver a strong and stable government. Instead, it left the country almost suffering a parliamentary coup enabled by John Bercow. After that came Johnson, who promised that leaving the EU would do the opposite of what his government delivered on net immigration, which he tripled. Starmer then spent weeks in parliament trying to find out exactly where Johnson was when a cake arrived in the same room as him, only for the Conservative membership to hand Britain Liz Truss after the Johnson period. By the time Sunak’s turn ended, there was again a strong belief that a new prime minister would fix the country’s ills.
That is the tension in the latest attacks on Starmer. They are not really about one set of local election results, and they are not even only about him. They are about a recurring British habit of treating the prime minister as a repairman for problems that run far deeper than one person in Downing Street. The logic is irresistible when a government looks weak. It is also usually false.
For Starmer, that makes the present moment more dangerous than the usual wave of complaint. Last week’s local elections gave the criticism a fresh trigger, but the broader charge had been building for days and was already in the air before the votes were counted. The question now is not whether the calls to replace him will continue. They will. The question is whether Labour can keep arguing that a change of leader is not the same thing as a change of fate.
