Just three months ago, the Labour party swept into power in the UK general elections, winning 412 seats in the 650-member parliament, a gain of 211 from before. It looked like the public was eager to throw out the Conservatives, whose 14 years of control had resulted in all manner of cuts to public services while giving tax and other benefits to the wealthy, something that is pretty much the standard right-wing playbook.

But after becoming the government, swept in with a seeming wave of enthusiasm, within just a 100 days, the popularity of the Labour party and its leader Keir Starmer has cratered and in some polls, he is now less popular than the former prime minister Rishi Suna, a startling downturn in fortunes..

So what happened? One of the features of the first-past-the-post system in UK elections is that it tends to overstate the popularity of the party that gets the most seats.

A close look at the election results showed Labour’s victory was shallow. Starmer’s party picked up just 34 percent of the vote, compared to the Conservatives on 24 and Nigel Farage’s insurgent right-leaning Reform U.K. party on 14 percent. 

The quirks of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, and Labour’s highly targeted campaign strategy, meant despite those closer than expected figures, Labour won 411 seats in the House of Commons while Reform got just five. 

“We’ve got a soft underbelly — and there’s a lot of it,” one senior Labour MP put it this week in their appraisal of the risk from Reform, which came second to Labour in 89 constituencies. Like others in this piece, they were granted anonymity in order to speak freely.

But there have also been a mixture of policy and personal issues that have deflated the Labour balloon.

The refusal to scrap the Conservatives’ cap on welfare payments to families with more than two children, introduced at the height of austerity, dealt Starmer his first parliamentary rebellion on July 23.

Seven Labour MPs backed a rebel amendment calling for the policy to be axed. Starmer responded with characteristic ruthlessness, suspending them from the parliamentary party.  

Then there is the issue of how Starmer and other top people have accepted gifts from wealthy donors, never a good look, while refusing to scrap the controversial cap on child benefits and slashing fuel payments to as many as ten million people.

After condemning the Tories for its austerity policies that harmed vulnerable people, continuing some of the most controversial of those policies seems obtuse.

One of the government’s first acts was to strip millions of retirees of a payment intended to help heat their homes in winter. It was intended to signal determination to take tough economic decisions, but it spawned a sharp backlash from Labour members and sections of the public.

This led one MP Rosie Duffield to quit the party and choose to sit as an independent.

“Forcing a vote [on the winter fuel payment] to make many older people iller and colder while you and your favorite colleagues enjoy free family trips to events most people would have to save hard for — why are you not showing even the slightest bit of embarrassment?” she wrote in the letter.

The departure of Duffield, who previously clashed with Starmer over trans rights, is a blow to a party that is yet to complete its first hundred days in office after winning a sweeping parliamentary majority in July. 

The new government has been consumed by scandal since revelations surfaced that the prime minister and close associates had accepted expensive gifts — including designer clothes —  from longtime Labour donor and peer Waheed Alli and other donors. Starmer himself is reported to have accepted £100,000 worth of gifts and has caused further frustration by repeatedly defending his decision. 

I wrote earlier about former Conservative minister Rory Stewart who warned Starmer about his ‘Ming Vase’ election strategy, where Starmer avoided laying out any bold vision about what Labour would do once it came into office for fear of alienating segments of the voters and relying instead on the desire of voters to throw the Tories out. Stewart said that it might well work in winning but would hamper them afterwards because they would not really have a mandate for actions. It would be a negative mandate, not a positive one. That seems to have come to pass.

There also seems to be a curious tone-deafness by Starmer about how his actions would be perceived.

It also sat awkwardly with news that Starmer had accepted thousands of pounds’ (dollars’) worth of clothes and designer eyeglasses from a wealthy Labour donor. Starmer insisted the gifts were within the rules, but after days of negative headlines agreed to pay back 6,000 pounds’ (almost $8,000) worth of gifts and hospitality, including tickets to see Taylor Swift.

And that is not all.

[I]t hasn’t looked great that, since April, he has disclosed receiving nearly forty thousand pounds’ worth of gifts in kind—including high-end clothes, eyeglasses, and the loan of an apartment—from a single Party donor. By coincidence, or not, the same donor, a TV executive and Labour peer named Waheed Alli, was given a security pass to Downing Street. The scandal, such as it is, has become known as “passes for glasses.” All of Alli’s gifts, along with other donations, were recorded and itemized, dutifully, by Starmer’s office—the cost of “multiple pairs of glasses” came to two thousand four hundred and eighty-five pounds—and then were seized on by his political opponents as evidence of sleaze and the new Prime Minister taking to the high life. (Since June, Starmer and his family received a total of ten tickets, worth more than seven thousand pounds, to see Taylor Swift, and four more tickets to see horse races in Doncaster.)
…

Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.)

Gifts of clothes and designer glasses? Really? Why would someone who earns enough to buy their own clothes and glasses need to accept gifts of those? The fact that these gifts were ‘within the rules’ should have been irrelevant to any politician attuned to the optics of such things. We see the same thing happening with New York City mayor Eric Adams who seemed to crave perks like flying first class on Turkish Airways, staying at luxury hotels in Istanbul, or eating at luxury restaurants, or Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife who seemed to actually demand bribes and luxury gifts.

That politicians can be bought is not surprising. What surprises me is that they can be bought so cheaply. The only reason that I can think of is that while these people’s official salaries are certainly substantial, and they do get other perks, they are not close to that of the wealthy people that they regularly come into contact with. They seem to desire aspects of the high life of those people, such as dining in expensive restaurants, flying first class, staying at fancy hotels and resorts, and dressing like them. To desire such things so much that one accepts gifts of them reveals a shallowness, an insecurity about their own worth, that they think can be masked by such trivialities.