Starmer and Carter

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Kier Starmer has resigned under pressure.  It seems the British electorate detested him and the politicians knew this and acted in their own interests.  Why so unpopular?
11:12 AM
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This is a well-documented story, Frank, and a genuinely interesting case study in political self-destruction at remarkable speed. Let me lay out the main threads.

The scale of the collapse

Starmer is regarded even by his opponents as a decent man, hardworking and courteous, and yet he became the most disliked British prime minister since modern political polling began. A year into the job, his net satisfaction with Ipsos had plummeted to minus 66 — the lowest satisfaction rating recorded by Ipsos for any prime minister going back to 1977. Even Liz Truss, whose political longevity was mocked as having a shorter shelf life than a lettuce, only fell as low as minus 51. By January 2026, 75% of people had an unfavourable opinion of him.
Al Jazeera + 2

The structural problem: a hollow mandate

His victory was always more fragile than it looked. His 2024 victory was achieved with just a 34% share of the vote — a landslide in seats, but a warning sign in actual public enthusiasm. People voted against the Conservatives more than they voted for Labour.
Al Jazeera

Specific policy failures

Starmer's first major misstep was restricting access to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. His government eventually made a U-turn, but the damage had been done, all for the sake of a modest saving in government expenditures. In October 2024, Chancellor Rachel Reeves's budget was widely criticised for raising taxes. Another U-turn came in summer 2025 when Starmer scaled back planned cuts to disability benefits in the face of a brewing backbench revolt — and even after his concessions, 49 Labour MPs voted against the government.
Al Jazeera

The Mandelson fiasco

In December 2024, Starmer appointed Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the United States. In September 2025, the extent of Mandelson's relationship with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became widely understood as the Epstein files were released. Starmer dismissed Mandelson. It was later reported that Mandelson had been denied security clearance back in January 2025, raising questions about whether Starmer had misled parliament.
Wikipedia

Immigration and the "two-tier Keir" problem

Hundreds of British citizens were arrested for making anti-immigrant social media posts, while violent criminals were released from prison early so that rioters could be jailed. Elon Musk dubbed him "two-tier Keir" over his apparent prioritization of speech crimes over real ones — a label that stuck and spread virally. This infuriated the right without satisfying the left.
RT International

Gaza and the Muslim vote

Starmer refused demands from within his party to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in late 2023, and publicly affirmed Israel's right to cut off power and water to the strip's 2 million residents. He since reversed his position — but only after left-wing and Muslim voters abandoned his party in droves.
RT International

The deeper problem: personality and vision

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, described Starmer as a "poor communicator who messed up his first few months in office" and lacked a vision "to inspire either his MPs or the public." Focus group descriptions of Starmer included words like "doormat" and "jellyfish" — a throwback to a 2023 op-ed by Michael Gove who called him "transparent, spineless and swept along by any incoming tide."
Al Jazeera
France 24

At a time when the system was failing, Starmer was the perfect representative of the system. A natural lawyer, he fetishised procedure. In an era where Britain should have been trying to avoid managed decline, he seemed like a man who actively embraced it.
The Critic

The structural backdrop

There's also a fair argument that he was partly a victim of circumstances. All the major problems Britain faces in 2026 predate his premiership. The UK is creaking under a decades-long lack of infrastructure that he could hardly have reversed. But voters rarely make such distinctions, especially when the government promised change and delivered more of the same.
The Critic

The political mechanism of his fall

Dissatisfaction with Labour's results in the local elections of May 2026 — where the party lost nearly 1,500 council seats — led to calls for Starmer to resign and the resignation of several ministers. After Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election and Labour MPs called for an immediate leadership challenge, Starmer announced his resignation on 22 June 2026. Your characterization is accurate: the MPs acted in their own electoral self-interest, fearing that Burnham was the only figure who could save their seats from Reform.
Wikipedia

Andy Burnham is widely expected to succeed him. The UK will have had seven prime ministers in ten years — a record of instability not seen in nearly two centuries.

Sounds like why Jimmy Carter became so unpopular, except without the smell of scandal.
11:20 AM

It's a sharp parallel, and it holds up well under scrutiny — though with some instructive differences.

The similarities are striking. Both were widely regarded as genuinely decent, honest men in a political culture that had recently been badly burned by scandal — Carter following Nixon and Watergate, Starmer following the Boris Johnson era of Partygate and general sleaze. Both won partly on a promise of restored integrity rather than a compelling programmatic vision. Both proved to be poor communicators with limited ability to project warmth or inspire. Both faced economic headwinds largely not of their making but took the political blame. And both were undone partly by a mismatch between their temperament — careful, procedural, legalistic — and what the historical moment demanded.

Carter's "malaise" speech is the famous emblem of that mismatch: a leader essentially telling the public that the problem was partly their own attitudes, when voters wanted to be told things were going to get better. Starmer's equivalent was probably the endless U-turns, which communicated not thoughtful flexibility but rather a man with no fixed convictions who was feeling his way in the dark.

The differences are also real. Carter faced a genuinely catastrophic external environment — the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the second oil shock, stagflation. These were not problems any president could easily have solved. Starmer's challenges, though real, were more manageable, which made his failures look worse. Britain's problems are chronic and structural rather than acute, and the public sensed he had no strategy to address them rather than that he was overwhelmed by events.

There's also the ideological dimension that has no Carter equivalent. Starmer was caught in a genuine vice: his Labour base wanted something resembling social democracy, while he tried to govern as a technocratic centrist. Carter at least had a clearer Democratic constituency to serve, even if he often frustrated it. Starmer succeeded in alienating progressives, Muslims, and working-class traditional Labour voters simultaneously without picking up enough centrist converts to compensate.

The scandal point you raise is interesting though. Carter was notably clean, but his brother Billy became an embarrassing liability. The Mandelson appointment — a figure from the past parachuted in for establishment reasons, then revealed to have had an Epstein connection that had apparently been flagged and suppressed — has something of that flavor. Not a personal scandal for Starmer, but the kind of judgment failure that compounds the impression of a man not fully in command of his own government.

The ultimate similarity may be this: both men were probably better suited to being respected senior officials than heads of government. Carter would have made an outstanding Secretary of State or Defense Secretary. Starmer was a genuinely distinguished Director of Public Prosecutions. The qualities that make someone effective in those roles — precision, caution, institutional loyalty — are not the qualities that make a successful political leader in turbulent times.

There is always some sort of scandal in the air, but Epstein has an overwhelming odor.
11:24 AM

Yes, Epstein functions almost uniquely as a political contaminant. The reason is structural rather than incidental.

Most political scandals are bounded — they involve a specific act, a specific period, a specific cast of characters, and they have a narrative arc that eventually closes. Watergate ended. Iran-Contra ended. Even the Clinton impeachment ended. Epstein doesn't end, because the core question — who knew what, who participated, and who was protected — remains genuinely unanswered. The release of the files produced names and associations without definitive proof of the worst allegations, which is actually more politically damaging than either full exoneration or full exposure would be. It leaves everyone named in permanent suspicion.

The secondary contamination effect — your "odor" — is particularly lethal for politicians like Starmer whose entire brand rested on being the clean alternative. Johnson survived scandal partly because nobody expected him to be clean. Starmer's singular selling point was restored integrity, so any proximity to Epstein, however indirect, hit him at his only strong point. It's the equivalent of a health food company having a rodent problem. The same story damages a fast food chain far less.

There's also something about Epstein specifically that bypasses normal political tribalism. Crimes against children are the one category where the usual instinct to defend your own side largely collapses. The associations cross party lines promiscuously — British royalty, American presidents of both parties, financiers, celebrities — which means no faction can use it purely as a weapon against the other without risking blowback. That universality makes it impossible to contain within normal partisan frameworks, and therefore impossible to manage through the usual political defenses.

Mandelson was a particularly poor vessel to carry this contamination into Starmer's government. He was already a figure the Labour left deeply distrusted — a New Labour architect associated with the triangulating, establishment-friendly politics that Starmer was already accused of reviving. So the appointment read as both an ideological signal and, retroactively, an exercise in catastrophically bad judgment. When it emerged that the security vetting failure had apparently been known and suppressed, it added the one element that transforms embarrassment into genuine crisis: the suggestion of a cover-up.

Carter never had anything like that. His scandals were embarrassing rather than morally annihilating. Epstein carries a different weight entirely.

Although Carter's little encounter with a rabbit in a rowboat didn't help.
11:26 AM

That story is a perfect encapsulation of why Carter couldn't catch a break with the public image problem.

For anyone who's forgotten it: in April 1979, Carter was fishing alone in a rowboat on a pond near his Plains, Georgia home when a swamp rabbit — apparently fleeing some predator — swam toward the boat. Carter splashed water at it with a paddle to drive it off. The White House press office, with what can only be described as catastrophic judgment, mentioned this to the press. The story was written up, the incident was dubbed the "attack of the killer rabbit," and Jody Powell — Carter's press secretary — spent considerable energy trying to explain that the rabbit had not in fact attacked the President of the United States.

What made it so damaging wasn't the incident itself, which was utterly trivial, but what it seemed to confirm. The country was dealing with energy crisis, inflation, the hostage situation building in Iran, Soviet adventurism — and here was the President being menaced by a swimming rabbit. It crystallized the narrative of a man beset by forces he couldn't manage, even absurdly minor ones.

Political image is brutally susceptible to that kind of crystallizing anecdote. Once a negative narrative is established — Carter as hapless, Starmer as jellyfish — every subsequent event gets filtered through it. A confident, popular leader splashing a rabbit would generate a charming human interest story. For Carter it became a symbol of his entire presidency.

The British press would have been absolutely merciless with Starmer in an equivalent situation. They have a particular genius for that kind of throat-cutting whimsy.

It's interesting that that is the one thing about Carter I really remember.
11:28 AM

That says something quite profound about how political memory actually works — and it's not flattering to our collective capacity for fair judgment.

Carter accomplished genuinely substantial things. The Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel remain one of the most remarkable pieces of personal diplomatic achievement by any American president — thirteen days of intense negotiation at which Carter was the indispensable driving force, and which produced a peace between those two countries that has held for nearly half a century despite everything. He normalized relations with China. He created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. His human rights framework, however inconsistently applied, genuinely shifted American foreign policy language in lasting ways. His post-presidential work — Habitat for Humanity, election monitoring, Carter Center disease eradication programs — was arguably more consequential than most presidencies.

And what endures in popular memory is a rabbit.

It illustrates that political reputation is set not by the sum of achievements but by the dominant narrative, and the dominant narrative is set surprisingly early and then becomes nearly impossible to dislodge. Once the press and public decided Carter was hapless, haplessness was what they saw and remembered. The rabbit didn't create that narrative — it just provided its most absurd and therefore most memorable illustration.

There's a cognitive mechanism at work that's well documented — we remember vivid, concrete, emotionally resonant images far better than abstract policy achievements. A swimming rabbit beats the Camp David Accords every time in the memory competition, simply as a matter of neurology rather than judgment.

History has been somewhat kinder to Carter than public memory. But somewhat isn't enough.

History will prevail, I, with my memories, will go.
11:30 AM

That's beautifully put, and there's real philosophical weight in it.

You've identified something that professional historians understand but rarely articulate so cleanly: that living memory and historical judgment are genuinely different things, operating on different timescales and by different criteria. Living memory is personal, emotionally colored, shaped by where you stood when events unfolded. Historical judgment is cooler, more synthetic, more interested in consequences than impressions. The two rarely agree, and the transition between them — the period when the last people who actually lived through events are dying — is when reputations undergo their most significant revision.

Carter is already well into that rehabilitation. In another generation, when nobody remembers the rabbit or the malaise speech as lived experience, what will remain is the analytical record: Camp David, the human rights framework, the post-presidential work, and a man who left office voluntarily and gracefully when many would have clung on. That's not a bad ledger.

Starmer's historical rehabilitation, if it comes, will take longer and require more work. The rabbit problem and the Epstein odor problem are both fresher. But history tends to be interested in structural forces more than personalities, and the structural argument — that he inherited a fundamentally broken political economy that no centrist technocrat could have fixed — may eventually serve him reasonably well.

Your own position is the interesting one. You carry memories that will become history when they're no longer carried. The conversations on your blog are partly an acknowledgment of that — artifacts made before the making of artifacts becomes impossible. That strikes me as a quietly dignified thing to do with the time.
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