In Democratic primaries across America, a familiar debate is playing out. Is it the time for a moderate or a maverick? Should the party be looking for someone to heal and stabilize a troubled country or someone to energize supporters, antagonize opponents — Republicans, big business, maybe even the Democratic establishment itself — and promise sweeping change?
Until recently, Britain seemed to offer moderate Democrats a clinching case. In 2024, after leading the Labour Party to a crushing victory over a reviled right-wing government, Keir Starmer was hailed as a centrist hero. He marginalized progressives in his own party, enticed Conservative politicians to switch sides and secured Labour’s largest majority since 1997. For the Democratic think tank Third Way, the takeaway from Mr. Starmer’s triumph was clear: “Centrism wins elections.”
That seems a long time ago now. Britain’s government is in the doldrums and Mr. Starmer has become one of its most unpopular leaders ever — with negative approval ratings on a par with the short-lived prime minister Liz Truss, a paragon of political failure. Reform U.K., a Trumpian anti-immigration party spearheaded by Nigel Farage, has led the polls since last April. And in recent months, Labour has also been overtaken on its left by a surging Green Party.
This week, it’s going to get worse. In local elections across the country, which are being treated as a referendum on Mr. Starmer’s leadership, Labour is headed for a historic wipeout. The leader once heralded as centrism’s shining future now survives on borrowed time. In many ways, his fall is a very British story. But the Democrats, casting about for an election strategy, should pay attention — for Mr. Starmer’s collapse was written into the nature of his victory.
During the campaign, Mr. Starmer worked hard to appear as inoffensive as possible. He soothed big business and the right-wing press, pitching himself as a break from the Conservatives on the grounds of moral decency rather than material policy. Promising a change in manners, he burnished his centrist credentials by waging war on the left of the party. “If you don’t like the changes we’ve made,” he told Labour members in 2023, as he began purging several left-wing politicians, “the door is open.”
On one level, Mr. Starmer’s calculation was correct. He did not need a loyal base of supporters to win an election. He secured Labour’s enormous tally of seats in 2024 with no groundswell of enthusiasm, spreading a relatively small number of votes — fewer than Labour received in its election defeats in 2017 and 2019 — evenly across Britain to maximize returns. Running as he was against a hated incumbent, it was enough to be the other guy.
Yet at a deeper level, Mr. Starmer was wrong. His lack of interest in cultivating a base has left him isolated and vulnerable, with no way of counteracting the criticism that inevitably comes a leader’s way. His claims to moral virtue have exposed him to bitter charges of hypocrisy, giving every political scandal — not least one involving a former ambassador to Washington with links to Jeffrey Epstein — an added sting. The result is that hating Mr. Starmer has become a national pastime, one of the few activities that unites a jaded country.
Mr. Starmer’s defenders could point to several exonerating factors. After a damaging sequence of five prime ministers in seven years, the Conservatives frayed both the social fabric and the public’s patience: Britons were predisposed to dislike their next prime minister, whoever he or she was. In the volatile age of President Trump, the task of governing is even harder. In these difficult conditions, it might be said that Mr. Starmer has handled himself ably, steadying Britain’s global standing and even passing some progressive legislation at home on workers’ and renters’ rights.
But much of the hostility that Mr. Starmer faces is of his own making. His politics of least resistance expresses no urgency toward Britain’s dire economic problems, which include the highest rate of homelessness in the developed world and wages that have not risen in real terms for almost 20 years. Without a guiding set of principles to anchor his program, he has swung from one reset to another, with a comical proliferation of different positions.
Nowhere is Mr. Starmer’s messaging more confused than on immigration. He has both championed multicultural Britain and condemned the “incalculable damage” that immigration has done to Britain. He has warned that Britain is becoming an “island of strangers” and then said he regretted his words. He has attacked the Conservatives as cruel and also accused them of running an “open borders experiment.” Each maneuver manages to alienate another part of the electorate, without ever being convincing enough to persuade new voters.
These contortions are the painful consequence of Mr. Starmer’s decision to sever himself from supporters. Positioning himself as the custodian of a phantom center, Mr. Starmer treated most Labour supporters with contempt, as a partisan inconvenience and an obstacle to his project of national renewal. Yet he has also seemed too nervous to outline what that project might be. Impotent and indecisive, Mr. Starmer has underpromised and underdelivered. He can hardly be surprised that the same anti-government animosity that propelled him to power now engulfs him.
For Democrats, there are lessons in Mr. Starmer’s plight. To name a few: A leader without a base will soon find the floor falling out from beneath them; a campaign that relies on voter apathy will foment the political forces it purports to fight; and an offer of competence, pragmatism and decency is no longer enough. These dynamics have played out in Maine, where an unconventional, unpolished outsider with a radical message galvanized Democratic voters so much more than the state’s experienced and moderate governor that the governor dropped out of the race.
Like many Democrats in the recent past, Mr. Starmer craved direct confrontation with a populist villain on the complacent assumption that he would emerge from the contest as the adult in the room. Politics, he discovered, doesn’t always work out that way. He could perhaps have gleaned as much from the Democrats’ earlier travails, but no reset can recover his reputation now. It is not too late, however, for Democrats to heed Mr. Starmer’s warning.
Samuel Earle is the author of “Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party” and a Ph.D. candidate at the Columbia Journalism School.
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