Keir Starmer’s approval ratings has declined by a historic amount after less than four months in office, according to a new poll.
The prime minister’s popularity was at plus 11 – when taking the average result of approval and disapproval scores – in July, after Labour swept to victory on a landslide in the election.
However, pollsters at More in Common have now found his personal rating has dropped to -38, a net drop of 49.
That score is lower even than Rishi Sunak’s rating of -37 after he led the Tories through a historic election loss in July.
Surprisingly, considering how he has largely avoided the public eye amid the contest to replace him, the outgoing party leader is now on -31.
It comes as Starmer has faced a tumultuous few months in office, including a row over how many freebies he accepts from Labour donors, backlash over restricting the winter fuel payments to pensioners and refusing to drop the two-child benefit cap.
Labour is also telling the public to brace themselves ahead of Wednesday’s “tough” Budget, where the government are looking to raise £40bn to “fix the foundations” of the country.
The executive director of More in Common, Luke Tryl, told The Telegraph this was an “unprecedented” result for Starmer compared to other recent PMs.
“Although [Labour] had a landslide, in terms of popularity they didn’t have the slack to spare that other new governments had,” Tryl said, suggesting the electorate may have become more volatile over the years.
Labour won a 174-seat majority in July but it received a lower share of the vote than any party forming a post–war majority government.
For comparison, it took much longer for previous Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, to face a similar decline in popularity.
His approval rating was on plus 46 three months after he was elected in 1997, and stayed in the net positive until 2000.
David Cameron’s approval rating also did not turn negative until the start of 2011 – he was elected to No.10 in May 2010.
Boris Johnson’s approval rating was at -20 when he got into office in 2019, but he had pushed it up to plus 14 by March 2020.
When LBC’s Nick Ferrari declared this was a “world record” decline in public approval ratings for a PM on Tuesday, health secretary Wes Streeting was quick to defend Starmer.
He said: “We are taking a whole bunch of decisions at the moment which are not going to make us very popular, because they are tough decisions.
“They are the right decisions, putting the country’s interests ahead of the party’s interests.”
He added: “The worst thing we could do right now is resort to government is duck the difficult decisions, resort to government by gimmick, sticking plaster politics and treat politics as a popularity contest.”
