It must be true: Andy Burnham is doomed. Why else would we be told so often that each of the last five prime ministers set a record for being the least popular occupant of that office? It follows that Burnham, who today finally realises his long-held dream of leading the Labour party, and the country, is heading to Downing Street at a time when voters are becoming ever more disillusioned with their leaders. Surely, before long he too will be the victim of an unforgiving electorate. That’s the doleful effect of dangerous cultural divisions, poisonous social media and rowdy behaviour at Westminster.
Except that the facts tell a different story. I can’t guarantee that Burnham’s ratings won’t sink to unplumbed deaths. What I do suggest is that the past record warns against an assumption of unavoidable disaster for the new prime minister.
Ipsos—formerly Mori—has been charting satisfaction ratings for almost half a century. Every PM has suffered bouts of unpopularity, times when at least 60 per cent of the public was dissatisfied with the way they were doing the job. But beyond that former prime ministers fall into four groups. There are two whose worst ratings stayed above -40 (James Callaghan and David Cameron); three whose worst minus ratings were in the mid -40s (Tony Blair, Theresa May and Boris Johnson); two whose worst ratings were -51 (Gordon Brown and Liz Truss); and four whose worst ratings were between -56 and -66 (Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer).
If we ignore a brief bump for Cameron before 2016, we see a steady downward progression from -38 to -59. This is the basis on which some observers say there are forces at work that make voters increasingly hostile to our national leaders.
But let’s inspect the numbers more carefully. There are two more substantial reasons to question the thesis of unstoppable public hostility.
The first is that Ipsos’s figures for Truss are from its poll conducted from 5th to 12th October 2022. She announced her resignation on 20th October. It’s clear from other polls that her reputation collapsed in her final days. In a poll conducted from 14th to 16th October, YouGov recorded a net rating of -70 (favourable 10 per cent, unfavourable 80). YouGov’s worst figures for Starmer, from last December, were favourable 15 per cent and unfavourable 76 per cent—terrible, but not as catastrophic as Truss. She, not he, is the true current holder of the wooden spoon.
Secondly, and more importantly, we should not ignore what happened before Cameron’s time. Voters had broadly the same low opinions at some point of Thatcher and Major as of Sunak and Starmer.
So public hostility to prime ministers is nothing new. Moreover, the story from Cameron to Sunak is easily explained not by some irresistible force directing public attitudes, but the circumstances of each premiership. First, Cameron lost the Brexit referendum, then May was brought down by Tory divisions over Brexit and after that Johnson lied over partygate. This was followed by Truss being run over by the financial markets and then Sunak taking the Tory leadership when voters had already decided to boot the party out of office.
That said, there is evidence of a historical shift—but that happened well before the 1980s. The figures come from Gallup, which tracked the reputations of UK politicians until 2001. In his six years as prime minister, from 1945 to 1951, Clement Attlee’s worst rating was -9. Winston Churchill (1951-55) and Anthony Eden (1955-57) never had negative net ratings. (In fact, Eden was more popular after the disastrous Suez invasion than he was before.) Harold Macmillan was the first postwar prime minister to have a negative net rating in double figures: -19 at the height of the Profumo crisis in April 1963.
The modern era of unpopular spasms really began with Harold Wilson (-34 in May 1968) and Edward Heath (-26 in June 1971). Since the 1980s, there have been fluctuations but no clear trend in the worst figures recorded by each prime minister.
This is not to say that Burnham will find it exactly easy to gain public approval. Labour is unpopular, not just Starmer. On the other hand, the new PM showed in Makerfield that he can win votes. He increased Labour’s share of the vote by 10 percentage points. This was the largest ever surge in a fully contested byelection by a party of government defending one of its own seats.
Burnham’s fate is not written in the stars, nor is it determined by history. It will be down to him to persuade voters of his merits and his policies—and it will be his fault if he fails.
A version of this article was originally published on Peter Kellner’s newsletter
