Coffee House Shots: why is Starmer so unpopular? with Lewis Goodall
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
Opinion polls consistently show Keir Starmer as one of the most unpopular Prime Ministers in history. His critics point to inertia and a lack of vision, while his supporters argue that media spin is harming the image of a decent man. Less than two years on from Labour's landslide victory, broadcaster Lewis Goodall joins James Heale to try to answer the question 'where did it all go wrong?' – a subject which Lewis explores in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary. Lewis explains the factors at play, from Starmer's personality and Labour party politics to the effect that the Conservative Party's implosion had on Labour's preparedness for government.
Is Starmer a politician from a bygone era? Or, following on from a run of unpopular Tory leaders, is modern British politics simply ungovernable?
Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The British right is up for grabs. As May's local elections approach, the Conservatives face strong competition from Reform UK. |
| 0:07.9 | Join the Spectator's assistant editor, Isabel Hardman, for the spectator debate, the fight for the right, on Wednesday, the 29th of April in London. |
| 0:15.5 | We will pit the Conservatives represented by Matthew Saeed and Dominic Johnson against Reform UK, represented by |
| 0:21.5 | Matt Goodwin and Danny Kruger. To see which party truly represents the future of the right, |
| 0:27.2 | book your tickets at spectator.com forward slash fight. |
| 0:36.6 | Hello and welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel and I'm joined today by the broadcaster Lewis Goodall, who is on a Channel 4 documentary on Dispatches. Where did it all go wrong for Kea Stama? So, Lewis, what's the answer? Well, it's interesting, James. I think as ever with prime ministers, whether they're successful or not, we can have a discussion how successful Stama has been. I think that the seeds for their demise are always so moorily |
| 0:58.1 | early on, right? And I mean this with Stama in two respects. One is that I think, frankly, and if you |
| 1:05.6 | talk to people around Stama, which I'm sure you've done as well, there is actually an |
| 1:09.3 | acknowledgement that for a very long time, perhaps not including Kirstama himself, |
| 1:14.1 | but certainly somewhere around them, always thought this was a sort of two-term thing. |
| 1:17.5 | If you think back to 2019, you know, the project wasn't really, even though Stama said it was, |
| 1:23.0 | about getting into government. |
| 1:24.2 | It was about saving the Labour Party in their own mind, right? |
| 1:27.8 | Stamaism insofar as it exists was largely a project of internal purification, i.e. battering the |
| 1:34.4 | left. And that meant that, frankly, you know, given the time period involved, that was where |
| 1:40.5 | all of the energy went in. And then what happens in mid-2020? |
| 1:43.7 | Mid-2020, frankly, the Labour Party is gifted an historic opportunity |
| 1:49.6 | because the Conservative Party completely implodes. |
| 1:52.2 | And suddenly, in a space of two years or so, |
| 1:55.7 | Starmerism has to go from being an internal project to an external project, |
| 2:00.1 | i.e. it has to have something not only to say |
| 2:01.8 | to the country, but something to do with the country. And on top of that, the second reason, |
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