Has Keir Starmer's "honeymoon" really been that bad?

New analysis by my colleague Damayanti Chatterjee and me.

Looking at a range of measures, the Prime Minister's honeymoon has been the second-best performing after Tony Blair. What is remarkable is how unpopular Starmer is, despite this.

Keir Starmer’s first year in government has undoubtedly been bad from a public perceptions perspective, with data from Ipsos from 1997 showing no other Prime Minister having a worse net approval rating after 12 months at the helm.  

But how bad has the first year in office actually been for Keir Starmer relative to his predecessors? This note looks at a range of economic data, and data on key issues (crime, migration and NHS waiting lists) to gauge how bad this honeymoon year has been – and how it compares with other Prime Ministers from Tony Blair onwards.   

On a range of metrics, Starmer’s honeymoon has actually been better than most of his predecessors 

Although the approval ratings are dire, our analysis of the official statistics suggests that Keir Starmer’s first year has not been particularly bad – as shown in the table below.

Economic growth has been lacklustre compared with pre-financial crisis norms, though the latest monthly GDP data from the Office for National Statistics show Starmer’s first year only beaten by Theresa May’s and Tony Blair’s. 

While inflation is above the Bank of England’s target range, strong wage growth of late means that Starmer has actually presided over the second-largest increase in real employee pay in his first year (again beaten by Tony Blair). 

And only Boris Johnson saw a larger decline in net migration in their first year, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Indeed, if we rank the measures in the table above and produce a “honeymoon index” of Prime Ministers’ first years in power, Starmer actually has the second-best honeymoon after Blair.

(For those that want to know, the honeymoon index weights every measure in the table above equally, produces a standardised z-score of each measure and ranks the average of these z-scores)

David Cameron and Boris Johnson have the worst – Cameron faced mounting government debt after the financial crisis as well as a significant squeeze on living standards (driven by the economy and policy choices such as the increase in VAT to 20%). Boris’s first year was derailed by the pandemic. 

Starmer’s unpopularity, then, is particularly remarkable given that his honeymoon from a data perspective has not been too bad. 

So why is Starmer so unpopular?

  

If the honeymoon year has not been so bad on paper, why is Starmer so disliked? This almost certainly reflects a range of factors, including: 

• Issues that are not captured in the data, such as the furore around donations for clothes and public events that dogged his first few months in office. 

• Policy choices such as on Winter Fuel Payments and disability benefits.  

• Change not being felt on the ground yet – with the public yet to recognise or reward declining immigration or rising real wages. 

• (More problematically for the government) the public not linking improvements to government policy and therefore unwilling to reward the government with approval.  

• Levels being more important than the direction of change – e.g. immigration may be falling, but still too high for many.  

  
  

Another factor is likely to be that some factors on our honeymoon scorecard matter more than others, with our analysis showing inflation and unemployment having a particularly negative impact on approval ratings. (Interestingly real wages are not that well correlated with Prime Minister approval ratings, suggesting few rewards from strong wage growth if inflation is still high).  

And on unemployment and inflation, Starmer has not had a great first year. Joblessness is ticking up and on this only Gordon Brown and Boris Johnson have fared worse in their first year. Inflation also remains above the Bank of England target.  

Economists often talk about the “misery index” – a combined measure of inflation and unemployment – and it may well be the case that these two economic measures play a key part in explaining Starmer’s unpopularity.  Though, as our chart below shows, the Prime Minister is more unpopular than even a “misery” measure would suggest.