Can Britain’s prime minister hold on?
Sir Keir Starmer has been prime minister of the United Kingdom for less than 15 months. Yet he has the air of a beleaguered and embattled leader: His net favorability rating is currently minus-50 — yes, you read that right — and he is one of the democratic world’s most unpopular leaders with his own voters.
On the face of it, this collapse of support is baffling. Labour won the July 2024 general election with a gargantuan majority in the House of Commons of 172 seats, the fourth-largest for a single party in modern British history. But the foundations were shallow: Although 211 more Labour members of Parliament were returned than at the previous election, the party’s share of the vote rose by only 1.6 percent. Only one-third of the electorate backed Labour, more disenchanted and tired of the Conservatives than enthused by Starmer’s alternative.
Misfortune and miscalculation have accompanied the prime minister like bodyguards. Economic growth has been extremely low, illegal immigration — an issue on which he campaigned hard — has risen rather than fallen and he has lost two Cabinet ministers, including his deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, to scandal. Last month, he was forced to recall his appointed ambassador to the U.S., Peter Mandelson, because of the latter’s links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
It is not just Starmer who is embattled, however. His Conservative Party opposition is being trammeled by Nigel Farage’s right-wing nationalist Reform party. Reform UK shook the political order by winning nearly 15 percent of the popular vote at the general election and has risen in the polls since then. It passed 25 percent in January 2025 and in May hit 30 percent. Reform has led every major poll since then. The Labour Party, in contrast, is static at around 20 percent.
The prime minister is deeply unpopular, hated by some, dismissed by others and, perhaps most dangerously, a figure of slightly tragic fun for a number of voters. His party’s polling numbers have collapsed to barely two-thirds of the unusually low support it won at the election. Surely a crisis is looming and the administration’s days are numbered?
In practical terms, I am not so sure. We have to distinguish between the fate of the prime minister and that of the government; after all, the Conservative Party went through five different leaders between 2010 and 2024 without relinquishing power. In British politics, premiers who no longer enjoy the support of their parties can be ousted in a heartbeat. The constitutional procedure is clear, that the King appoints whoever replaces them. Fundamentally, since the recognizable beginnings of the office in the 1720s, the prime minister is the person who can command a majority in the House of Commons.
Starmer’s Labour Party, unlike the Conservatives, has no real history of regicide. A Labour prime minister has never been explicitly unseated by the party — at least six Conservatives have, and you could argue a higher number. The last Labour party leader to be forced out was J.R. Clynes in 1922. The party’s rulebook stipulates that 20 percent of Labour members of Parliament (which currently means 80 MPs) can trigger a leadership election, which would be open to all party members.
A challenge requires a lot of Labour members of Parliament to expose themselves. As Ralph Waldo Emerson advised Oliver Wendell Holmes, “when you strike at a king, you must kill him.” Moreover, the evidence suggests that Labour’s 330,000 members are disproportionately male, middle-aged and middle-class, like Starmer himself. But the possibility of a coup remains, especially as MPs start to fear for their own electoral survival.
The downfall of the government remains much less likely. The Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act of 2022 means that a general election is not required until summer 2029. The only reason Parliament might be dissolved early and new elections held is if the government were defeated in the House of Commons, either on a formal vote of confidence or on a major issue on which it has staked its credibility.
There are 399 Labour MPs, and nine who are currently suspended from the party but would likely support it, in a House of 650. For the government to lose a vote, around 80 of those would need to connive in its downfall. They may not like Starmer, but Labour is currently at about 20 percent in the polls, 10 points adrift of Reform. Forcing a general election would be political suicide.
If a British government has a workable majority in the House of Commons and wants to remain in office until the scheduled election, effectively it can do so. Only Labour’s own MPs could bring the administration down, and they have no motivation to do so.
Starmer’s leadership is in the balance. His party could remove him. Although it would be unprecedented for Labour, everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time. But the Labour government is likely to go on until 2029, unless the prime minister — whoever that may be — sees an advantage in an early election. Certainly, there is not one at the moment.
Eliot Wilson is a senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.