Starmer is living on another Planet

Allister Heath Daily Telegraph 09/05/26 Sir Keir Starmer lives on another planet if he thinks he can keep going as PM and leader of the Labour Party. His allies are equally deluded: Operation Save Sir Keir Starmer can only end in tears. His election results were abysmal, Labour has been obliterated in swathes of the country and decimated in the rest, and Starmer must carry the blame.

The party has a crucial choice: either ditch him as soon as possible, and hope that it can somehow extricate itself from its death spiral, or face guaranteed oblivion and perhaps even total extinction. Labour is now in an even worse position than the Tories, with Starmer’s party bereft of any purpose, or any unique selling point in a fragmenting society and a multi-party system. Labour has nothing to lose by throwing him out; its problem, of course, is the poor quality of the alternatives on offer. Greater Manchester and the North West were a disaster for Labour yesterday: Andy Burnham, the so-called King of the North, is unlikely to be the solution anywhere in the country. The other Labour leadership candidates would probably all lose their seats in a general election. If one were held tomorrow, Reform would be by far the biggest party, albeit most likely in a hung Parliament, and Nigel Farage would become PM after doing a deal with Kemi Badenoch, whose party, while crippled, is stabilising at a survivable level. The SNP and Plaid Cymru are the other two big winners of these elections, replacing Labour as the principal party of the Left. The Greens did well, but remain a niche urban party for now. The Lib Dems crept up again. Farage is the great victor, a man who has built a massive election-winning movement from scratch. It is only because of poor expectation management – Reform was never going to win Wales, though coming second with 34 seats is a brilliant result – and a good performance by Badenoch among some conservative-inclined demographics, that its performance perhaps didn’t seem as spectacular as it was in the real world. Extrapolating this week’s results, Labour would only just be in second place, with the Tories breathing down its neck. It’s not just that Starmer’s party lost a lot more than half its council seats, was almost expunged from Wales, crushed in Scotland and fatally squeezed between Reform and the Greens. It is worse than that. The PM’s real legacy is that Labour no longer has a base, a raison d’être, a meaningful core vote. Its remaining voters merely tick the Labour box out of habit. The party hasn’t troughed, and could decline further over the next few years. Wales could be the future of the English Labour party too. There is no purpose in voting for it: if you are a communist or hold hateful views, you can vote for the Greens. If you are an aspirational working-class voter, you will probably vote Reform. If you are a prosperous centrist or live in certain parts of the country, such as South West London or St Albans, you will vote Lib Dem. Reform, by contrast, knows exactly who its voters are, and they know exactly who they want to vote for. Farage’s challenge is that he remains a few percentage points below the level he needs to win outright, largely because he hasn’t managed to appeal sufficiently to some groups of Right-wing voters. The central reason for that is the stickiness of the Tories: they are suffering extremely badly but are not dead. Their ship has steadied, though at a much lower level than even in 2024. Badenoch has done a good job in terrible circumstances. She lost fewer than half her seats; a disaster but, miraculously, not an existential moment. Unlike Labour, which lost everywhere and gained nowhere, the Tories were hammered in many places but managed to fight back in a small number of other localities, thus changing the narrative. The Tories have consolidated their grip on certain groups of wealthy suburbanites and shire dwellers, multi-ethnic Right-leaning voters (including Jewish, Hindu and Iranian voters) as well as Conservative-inclined voters in many parts of London. Their biggest success was in the capital: they were annihilated in South West London and in Havering, but they held firm elsewhere and made some striking gains against Labour. They won back Westminster, performed superbly in Harrow, Barnet, Enfield and Hillingdon and gained seats elsewhere, even in Brent. They retained control in Bexley and Bromley in outer South East London, areas Reform hoped to win. Outside of London, the Tories did well in Harlow, though they were crushed in much of the rest of Essex. They made gains in Three Rivers in Hertfordshire and in a handful of other prosperous areas across Great Britain. They were wiped out in many places, absorbed a catastrophic shift to Reform in swathes of their erstwhile heartlands, and suffered terrible losses in Wales – but at least they didn’t go backwards everywhere, unlike Labour. All of this simply magnifies Starmer's woes. Led by the worst PM in living memory, Labour is finished; even without him, it may well be doomed, bereft of any solutions to our country’s pathologies. If Labour retains even a modicum of a survival instinct, now is the time to roll the dice.