Steve Smith is a former Bristol City Councillor (2018-24) and West of England Mayoral Candidate (2025).
Sir Keir Starmer is the most unpopular Prime Minister in history, according to a recent poll. That would be music to Conservative ears, if he hadn’t taken the title from Rishi Sunak, who took it from Liz Truss. In fact, in recent years the British public has taken a dimmer view of each successive Prime Minister, and the pattern seems to be accelerating.
Given Starmer is obviously useless at the job, it would be easy to think that the public has a pretty accurate opinion of him and move on. Is that all though, or is there a deeper reason why people are less and less satisfied with their politicians? Has every PM, and by extension every government, really been worse than the last, or is there something else happening? Three possibilities present themselves.
First, it could be us, the great British public. Is it possible that we’re just getting harder to please? Perhaps having our own personalised news feeds beamed into our pockets 24/7 has shown us the flaws of government in sharper focus than ever before, and we just demand more of each government that it could ever deliver. This is not an attractive idea because if it’s right it’s hard to see where it ends without the UK becoming entirely ungovernable. Sadly though, being unattractive doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
Second, it could be a policy problem. There are a handful of big, serious, difficult problems facing the country that no recent government has got a grip of. Most of us reasonably expect that if we work hard our lives will get better, and our children’s lives will be better than ours. In the eighties and nineties that seemed to be happening but too many people now feel like that improvement has stopped, and they’re not happy about it.
On the economic side, a persistent failure to improve productivity has meant that GDP per capita has barely grown. Living standards are stagnant at best and we can’t afford the ever-increasing bill for the public services that we want, so nothing works properly. We know how to fix this, because we’ve been here before. Cut the size of the state, deregulate, reduce costs on businesses and incentivise investment. It worked for Mrs T and it will work again, but successive governments of both colours have preferred to fill the gap with more tax and borrowing rather than tell people difficult truths. It hasn’t worked.
On social policy we’ve seen eye-watering levels of immigration combined with a failure of integration, weak law enforcement and the capture of our institutions by a mushy wokeness. The result is a fractured society and people withdrawing from shared civic spaces. We know in our own voluntary parties that it’s harder than ever to get people to engage, and the same is happening across charity and community organisations. Too many people just don’t see the country and the society that they thought they lived in when they open their front doors. Governments of all stripes have talked a good game on these issues, but shied away from making the tough decisions, preferring to appear “nice” and “cuddly” rather than risk being called “racist” or “cruel” by critics. It hasn’t worked.
Voters aren’t stupid. They can see these serious problems getting worse, and successive governments failing to tackle them. Is it any wonder they’re losing patience?
Third, there’s a machinery-of-state problem. We heard Keir Starmer complain before Christmas that nothing happened when he pulled a lever. He’s right, although he’s failed to understand that it’s his job to fix the machine. The problem he’s discovered is that the politicians aren’t really in charge. There’s an old joke which says that no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. Back in the day that meant an army of Eton-and-Oxford Sir Humphreys. Today it’s the quangocracy, the blob, the lanyard class, the Establishment.
Whether they’re in the ever-swelling ranks of the civil service (up a third since 2016), sitting on the boards of public bodies, NHS Trusts or charities, the people who really run everything are a relatively small and self-selecting group. They’re middle-class, well-educated, well-off and generally of a soft-left, dinner-party-woke inclination. They’re the good guys, and they’re not going to let any of those nasty politicians get their way if they can help it, especially if those politicians should come from the right (urghh).
They are convinced that everyone agrees with them, while simultaneously being completely out of step with the vast majority of British people. Generations of politicians have found it convenient to outsource decision making to officials, so when people look at government and see it doing things they disapprove of, often what they see is the actions or preferences of the Establishment. You can’t vote against them though so it’s politicians, and particularly Prime Ministers, who bear the brunt of that dissatisfaction.
What, then is to be done to restore a politics that will better satisfy the people who vote and pay for it? Well, if our first option turns out to be correct and we really are just getting harder to please then politicians will always be on a hiding to nothing. Taking a more optimistic view, options two and three do present opportunities to turn things around.
If dissatisfaction is caused by poor policy, the answer is better policy. We need to be honest with people about the scale and nature of the problems facing the country and the sacrifices required to solve them. We need serious, thought-through solutions that are equal to the magnitude of the challenge, not easy slogans that make people feel better.
If the cause is the impotence of politicians under blob rule, we need politicians with the courage and will to take accountability for their own decisions, and the ability to rewire the machinery of state and get that control back.
Faced with those two requirements, there is one party and one leader in UK politics today who understands both and is doing the work to achieve them. That of course is the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch. There’s a long, hard road between being right and getting elected, but we can be confident that we’re starting from the right place.
