2025 is the year that shows Starmer has the reverse Midas touch

2025 is the year that shows Starmer has the reverse Midas touch The only thing that could save the Prime Minister is that those likely to replace him are unlikely to do a better job Tom Harris Daily Telegraph 22/12/25 As Keir Starmer toasts the arrival of the New Year in a little over a week’s time, he would not be blamed for saying a bitter “good riddance” to 2025.

Ever since Her (late) Majesty the Queen introduced into common usage the term “annus horribilis” as a description of 1992 in her Christmas message of that year, it has been customary to apply the designation to certain years in unfortunate politicians’ careers. But it is hard to summon from the memory banks a year that has been quite this bad for a prime minister, one that started off badly and which is set to end on an even more bleak note. A year that kicked off with a very public row between Starmer and the owner of Twitter/X, Elon Musk, over the rape gang scandal – with Musk accusing the Prime Minister of failing to prosecute offenders when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, and Starmer sticking to his doomed line that no further public inquiries into the scandal were required – is now ending with the first survey of public opinion since the days of Boris Johnson to put the Conservatives ahead of Labour. The Telegraph’s poll tracker puts the Conservatives in second place with 18.6 per cent of public support, just ahead of Labour on 17.9 per cent. In truth, neither party can afford to be overjoyed about this, since Reform UK is confirmed to have maintained its ten-point lead at the head of the pack with 29.5 per cent. What has been extraordinary, from a political perspective, is just how packed with mishaps and controversies 2025 has been for the Prime Minister, and how grimly has been the public’s judgment of the man, and not just the party he leads. The previous year may have delivered only half as many unforced errors by ministers, but only because Labour was only in government from July of 2024. It is to be hoped that Starmer resists the temptation to persuade himself that a New Year will bring new popularity alongside (yet another) relaunch of the Government he leads. And yet fairness demands that we look below the surface of Starmer’s personal unpopularity in order to divine whether he has the sole responsibility for the unprecedented unpopularity of his party and his Government – or whether he might be seen, at least in part, as a victim of circumstances outside his control. Unhelpful comparisons of this Government are often made with the last Labour government, whose popularity lasted, pretty much uninterrupted, from 1997 until the aftermath of the 2005 general election. But would Blair’s administration have prospered had it had to contend with the extreme levels of scrutiny and criticism that is now possible using social media and the internet? What would have been the prospects of the Blair premiership had he inherited from his predecessor an economic situation as challenging as that bequeathed by Rishi Sunak in 2024, rather than what is often described as the “golden legacy” Blair inherited from John Major? These are diverting historical counterfactuals which, alas, do not help the Prime Minister as he prepares to negotiate the troubled waters of 2026. The reasons why his Government (and he personally) are so unpopular – one might justifiably say “hated” by a fair proportion of the electorate – matter less than the fact that this is the reality he faces as the countdown to May’s elections gets underway. However many local contests are cancelled by ministers claiming that imminent local government reorganisation makes such municipal contests meaningless and unnecessarily expensive, Starmer cannot escape the judgment of the people, especially in Wales and Scotland, both of which are already lining up to provide the worst news of the night for the Prime Minister. The uncomfortable truth is that, until Starmer arrived in Downing Street, Eluned Morgan had a reasonable chance of re-election as Wales’s first minister, while Anas Sarwar was on track to replace John Swinney at the head of the Scottish Government. It may seem unfair (and it is certainly resented in the ranks of Scottish Labour) that the act of taking the reins at Westminster has fatally undermined Labour’s electoral prospects everywhere else. But it is an undeniable and significant fact. Starmer, in short, has been proven to have the reverse Midas touch. And in the first half of 2026 we will see what his party intends to do about it. The only thing that might save his premiership, or at least preserve it until the inevitable judgment of the electorate can be postponed no longer, is a conviction among MPs that none of his likely replacements would do any better.