Politically, are you a bit down these days? Feeling that last year’s election result has turned sour? That glad, confident morning is a distant memory? That Britain these days is in as big a mess as ever? That neither Labour nor the Tories understand where they have gone wrong?
If so, you are not alone. Reform’s consistent lead in the polls is a product of widespread disenchantment with both the government and the official opposition. Despite that, there is a temptation, especially among the loyalists of both parties, to trust that things will improve. There is time to recover, as both parties have in the past.
Maybe one or both will. But history warns against such optimism. Last year’s election was the seventh in 60 years to lead to a change of government. But what has happened this time is out of line with the other six to a degree that should terrify both Labour and the Tories. And it’s not just the latest controversies over Angela Rayner’s resignation and Peter Mandelson’s sacking. Trouble was baked in from the very beginning. Early missteps by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, and the Conservatives’ choice of leader to succeed Rishi Sunak, have merely made a bad position even worse.
To get to the heart of the matter, I have borrowed the economic concept of the “misery index”, devised by Arthur Okun, an American economist. He proposed a simple but powerful indicator of the health of a nation’s economy: add together the percentage rates for unemployment and inflation. Currently, the UK’s misery index stands at 8.5—the sum of a 4.7 per cent unemployment and 3.8 per cent inflation. It’s too high. The government, any government, would like it to be around five, with a 3 per cent unemployment rate and 2 per cent inflation rate.
For its political equivalent, I have calculated a “respect index”. It measures the political health of the leaders of the two main parties at Westminster by adding their net satisfaction rates together. I have done this for the run-up to each of the last seven elections at which power has changed hands, and the 12 months that followed each vote.
For example, at the start of the 1964 election, Gallup found that 59 per cent of the electorate thought Harold Wilson was doing a good job as Labour leader, while 24 per cent said he was doing a bad job. So Wilson’s net rating, good minus bad, was plus 35. Alec Douglas-Home, the soon-to-depart Conservative prime minister, enjoyed a rating that was plus eight; 46 per cent thought he was doing a good job, 38 per cent thought he was doing badly. Add together the two leaders' ratings, plus 35 and plus eight, and the respect index stands at plus 43. Overall, when the index is positive, there is widespread contentment with the choice available to voters. Trouble arrives when the index is negative. The more negative the index goes, the more dissatisfied voters are with their choice.
Before last year’s election, the worst respect index around a change election was minus 21. This was at the start of the 2010 campaign, when Gordon Brown’s poor rating, minus 24, outweighed David Cameron’s plus three. The Tories, of course, failed to secure an overall majority and had to bring the Liberal Democrats into a coalition government, reflecting the lack of enthusiasm among voters for the leaders of the two major parties.
Last year’s election shattered that record, with Rishi Sunak’s catastrophic rating of minus 55, compounded by Starmer’s minus 19. These figures contributed to the weak voting totals of both of their parties. But because the 36-point gap between the two leaders was so great (exceeded only by the 49-point gap between Tony Blair and John Major), Labour cruised to its loveless landslide.
Since then, the respect index has worsened to minus 84. For the first time, the index has deteriorated since a change election. Starmer’s figures on his first anniversary as prime minister were virtually identical to Sunak’s last summer. Kemi Badenoch’s arrival, meanwhile, has marginally improved the public verdict on her party’s leadership—from catastrophic to terrible.
Last year was not the first time that a prime minister has gained power with a negative personal rating. It has happened once before, with Edward Heath in 1970. This is not a happy precedent. Heath was the only one of the previous winners in this series to be defeated at the following election.
Nor is this the first time that both the new prime minister and opposition leader have been in negative territory 12 months into a new parliament. Cameron and Ed Miliband suffered that fate in 2011. But they were only just on the wrong side of parity. Their ratings of minus three and minus eight produced an overall respect index of minus 11—a far cry from this year’s minus 84. Otherwise, after every change election from 1964 to 1997, the overall one-year index was positive, with at least one leader, and on two occasions both, having a positive score.
That said, only Blair saw his popularity rise after being elected prime minister, jumping 22 points to plus 44 by May 1998 after his election the previous year. Pre-Starmer, the rest saw their ratings slip during their first year in Downing Street—but not by much. Wilson after 1964 fell by three points and after 1974 by four, Heath by seven, Thatcher by nine and Cameron by six. Starmer’s 35-point descent, from minus 19 to minus 54, is in a far more disastrous league.
With voters so disenchanted with both Starmer and Badenoch, no wonder that so many have shifted to smaller parties. MPs past and present, too. Danny Kruger’s defection from Tory to Reform may not be the last. But are we witnessing no more than a short-term, if dramatic, blip, or have voters made up their minds, with no way back for either leader?
The writer and historian Philip Stephens puts the optimistic case, for Starmer at least. He says polls are snapshots of the present, not infallible guides to the future. The next election could be almost four years away. Stephens thinks that “the chances of the Reform leader walking into 10 Downing Street are as close to zero as to make no difference” and that Starmer remains the favourite to be re-elected.
He is plainly right that polls are snapshots. They don’t tell us everything—but neither do they tell us nothing. And what they have been telling us month after month is much the same. At the start of this year, a case could be made for saying that Starmer and Badenoch were on probation, and that firm verdicts from an unhappy electorate were not yet available. Now they are. Something extraordinary will have to happen for either leader to climb out of the hole they are in.
As for the next election, I think Stephens understates Farage’s prospects. His chances of becoming prime minister are low; but they are not negligible. The bookmaker, William Hill, puts the odds as short as 2/1. This is equivalent to a chance of 33 per cent, a remarkable figure when Reform has just five MPs. But even if the true likelihood is more like 10 per cent, that’s still too high for comfort.
Politics is a rough trade. Talent, decency, hard work and devotion to the most laudable principles are not always rewarded. But parties cannot afford to be sentimental. The lesson from the polls, and from the comparisons with past incoming governments, is clear. The ratings of the respect index need to change rapidly and radically. If they don’t, the most useful first step that the two main parties could take to thwart Reform will be to find new leaders. Only then can their hard march back to electability begin.
A version of this article was originally published on Peter Kellner’s Substack
