Why is Starmer so unpopular? with Lewis Goodall
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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 | Hello and welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel and I'm joined |
| 0:08.4 | today by the broadcaster Lewis Goodall, who is on Channel 4 documentary on Dispatches. Where did it all go wrong for Keir Stama? |
| 0:14.5 | So Lewis, what's the answer? Well, it's interesting, James. I think as ever with prime ministers, |
| 0:19.8 | whether they're successful or not, we can have a discussion on how successful Stama has been. I think that the seeds for their |
| 0:24.5 | demise are always so early on, right? And I mean this with Stama in two respects. One is that, |
| 0:31.7 | I think, frankly, and if you talk to people around Stamber, which I'm sure you've done as well, |
| 0:35.8 | there is actually an acknowledgement that for a very long time, perhaps not including Kirstama himself, but certainly somewhere |
| 0:42.0 | around them, always thought this was a sort of two-term thing. If you think back to 2019, |
| 0:47.0 | you know, the project wasn't really, even though Stama said it was, about getting into government. |
| 0:51.7 | It was about saving the Labour Party in their own mind, right? |
| 0:55.2 | Starmerism insofar as it exists was largely a project of internal purification, |
| 1:01.2 | i.e. battering the left. |
| 1:03.1 | And that meant that, frankly, you know, given the time period involved, |
| 1:07.4 | that was where all of the energy went in. |
| 1:09.5 | And then what happens in mid-2020? |
| 1:11.2 | Mid-2020, frankly, the Labour Party is gifted an historic opportunity because the Conservative |
| 1:17.8 | Party completely implodes. And suddenly, in a space of two years or so, Starmerism has to go |
| 1:24.1 | from being an internal project to an external project, i.e. it has to have |
| 1:28.2 | something not only to say to the country, but something to do with the country. And on top of that, |
| 1:34.5 | the second reason, you might have just been able to get away with that. It wasn't easy. I mean, |
| 1:38.3 | you know, the sort of scale of the problems they were coming in, didn't have very much time. |
| 1:42.6 | That may have been easier if you had a leader, a principle, |
... |
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