Should Labour Have Changed Its Leader?

Keir Starmer's resignation as Prime Minister had an air of inevitability about it towards the end. It reflects a recent development in British politics, which is the rapid growth in the number of prime ministers who have been in office since the Brexit referendum of 2016. Prime ministers are increasingly as insecure as Premier League football managers. Table 1 lists these in the successive decades since 1985. It has gone from two prime ministers in the decades 1985–1995 and 1995–2005 to a total of seven from 2015 to 2026.

This development is related to the wider fragmentation of the British party system. When the governing party can't get a working majority—something which happened in 2010 and again in 2017—then the leader is likely to get part of the blame.

A second factor is the increasingly large gaps between the vote shares and the seat shares in general elections produced by the first-past-the-post system. This means that the party of government lacks legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of voters who did not support it. The result is that the winning party is likely to have a short honeymoon before rapidly facing criticism. The leader then gets blamed. This happened to Boris Johnson after the 2019 election and again to Keir Starmer after the 2024 election.

Another reason is that the attitudes of Conservative and Labour MPs and party members toward their respective leaders have historically been quite different from each other. It is not surprising that six of the seven prime ministers in office since 2015 were Conservatives and only one was Labour.

Leadership and the Conservative Party

Margaret Thatcher dominated the politics of the 1980s but became increasingly unpopular during that decade. In her case, replacing the leader turned out to be a very successful way of regaining support for her party. John Major went on to win the 1992 general election against expectations and this served to reinforce the perception the Conservatives already had that changing the leader reboots the party and brings about electoral success.

This experience set a precedent in the Conservative Party and it was reinforced by the growing divisions under John Major in relation to the UK's membership of the European Union. These divisions contributed to Labour's landslide victory in the 1997 election. Subsequently, Labour's thirteen years in office produced four successive Conservative leaders. The period since 2015 has tested to destruction the idea that this produces electoral success.

Leadership and the Labour Party

Traditionally, the Labour Party has been reluctant to sack its leaders. Invariably, the leader has stepped down following an electoral defeat or because of illness or death. Even then, Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson survived the loss of general elections, staying on as leaders until they decided to retire.

Political scientist Henry Drucker explains that ‘this traditional tenderness to its leaders is, I want to argue, an important part of Labour's ideology’. He identifies what he calls an ‘ethos’ consisting of deeply held folk memories of past struggles, emphasising the need for class solidarity and the importance of loyalty to the Labour ‘movement’.

However, this long-standing convention has now been breached after numerous mistakes and U-turns by the Starmer administration. Keir Starmer's fall from grace was quite rapid.

The electoral consequences of changing leaders

This section focusses on the key hypothesis in this paper, namely, that voters are more likely to concentrate on the performance of incumbent parties rather than the prime minister when deciding which party to support. Prime ministers do indeed influence the vote, but the impact is relatively small compared with party performance. This carries the implication that changing the leader will only have a marginal impact on voting intentions. This idea is explored using monthly time series data over a period of twenty-eight years.

Figure 1 shows trends in the three variables used to predict voting intentions for the governing party. These are satisfaction with the performance of that party, together with satisfaction with the current prime minister and with the leader of the opposition. These measures, along with some control variables, identify the importance of parties and leaders in influencing vote intentions.

Modelling voting intentions

The results of modelling voting intentions appear in Table 2, showing that all three satisfaction variables have a significant impact on voting intentions. Net approval of the government and prime minister boosts incumbent support and approval of the leader of the opposition weakens it. The key finding is that satisfaction with the governing party has more than three-and-a-half times the impact (0.52) on voting intentions as satisfaction with the prime minister (0.14).

This explains why frequent changes in the leadership of the Conservative Party from 2015 had little effect on the party's vote. Unlike in 1990, when John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher, changing the leader did not improve things. The current concern among Labour supporters is that this may also be true for Andy Burnham.

In the two-party system of the past, if voters disliked the performance of the incumbent, they would switch to its main rival. Increasingly, they now switch to another party that is not Labour or the Conservatives.

Discussion and conclusions

Even though the party is losing MPs and members to Reform and has a historically poor performance in the polls, Kemi Badenoch is likely to remain Conservative leader since there is little to gain in removing her. A similar point can be made about Andy Burnham. Now that Labour has broken with the taboo of not ousting its leader, it is unlikely to be able to repeat this before the next general election in 2028/2029.

To be fair, there were brief exceptions to the pattern of leaders being less important than parties over the last decade, which can be seen in Figure 1. When Theresa May replaced David Cameron following the Brexit referendum, she was much more popular than her party. Satisfaction with her government did rise, but satisfaction with her performance rose faster. However, she squandered this advantage by calling an early election in 2017 when the polls looked favourable. This meant breaking the promise made when she entered Downing Street that she would not call an early general election.

Again, the arrival of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister in the summer of 2019 boosted Conservative support as well as satisfaction with the Prime Minister. But, as Figure 1 shows, this was relatively short-lived.

These results suggest that, while the new Labour leader will likely have a honeymoon in office, he needs to change the approval ratings for his party by convincing voters that it will effectively deliver on its commitments. He will need to show voters that he can improve things, particularly in relation to boosting economic growth, if Labour is to win the next election.