The majority of the British public disapprove of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s performance during his first two months in office, a poll has found.
A survey from YouGov on behalf of The Times of London showed that 53 per cent of the public think that Starmer is doing badly as prime minister, including one-fifth of those who backed his left-wing Labour Party at the general election.
Perhaps most concerning for the fledgeling government, the poll went on to find that one in seven who voted Labour in July regret their decision. Times political editor Steven Swinford declared Saturday: “The honeymoon is over for Keir Starmer”.
The polling comes amid a budding scandal surrounding “gifts” given to the prime minister and his wife from top Labour Party donors, such as Lord Waheed Alli.
Starmer is reported to have accepted £100,000 in freebies during his time as Labour leader, including hotel accommodations, Taylor Swift tickets, suits, and glasses.
YouGov found that Fifty-four per cent of voters said that they knew about the scandal, while 64 per cent said that it was wrong to accept gifts for his wife.
The prime minister has received pushback from within his own party, including from longtime MP Diane Abbott, who accused Starmer of being “in the pocket of millionaires”.
Sir Keir said on Friday that he would stop taking clothes as personal gifts while in office, a pledge repeated by his deputy Angela Rayner and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, who is also said to have received thousands in clothing from the widow of former a Labour Party donor.
In his Mail on Sunday column, prominent conservative political commentator Peter Hitchens, who publicly warned of the danger posed by Starmer as a potential re-incarnation of Tony Blair, questioned whether the failure to foresee the potential for scandal demonstrated that the prime minister is not as capable of a political operator as previously assumed.
“How could Sir Keir, for instance, not have realised that his childlike readiness to accept shiny gifts was a danger? Honestly, free suits for him and free dresses for his wife? VIP seats at concerts and football matches? This would be a very cheap price to accept for your soul, if you thought you had one, as he doesn’t. Perhaps the free glasses failed to improve his vision and made him unable to spot approaching disaster,” Hitchens wrote.
In addition to the freebies scandal, Starmer has faced criticism from multiple angles, including for his handling of the anti-mass migration riots over the summer, the failure to stem the tide of the illegal boat migrant crisis in the English Channel — with over 10,000 crossings already under his watch — to the decision by his left-wing government to cut winter fuel subsidies for pensioners despite the high cost of energy.
The public is also bracing for fresh tax hikes from the Starmer government this autumn, despite the sluggish recovery from the economic shocks of coronavirus lockdowns and the war in Ukraine.