British Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivers his keynote speech at the Labour Party's annual conference, in Liverpool, England, on Sept. 24.Temilade Adelaja/Reuters
When Keir Starmer led Britain’s Labour Party to a landslide victory in July, he promised a new approach to governing and vowed to “put country first, party second.”
But after less than three months in office, Mr. Starmer has offered little in the way of change and is already bogged down in controversy.
He has faced questions about donations from party donors, criticism for being too downbeat and accusations that his government has turned its back on low-income seniors. Meanwhile, his public-approval ratings have sunk even lower than those of Rishi Sunak, the deeply unpopular Conservative prime minister who was thrashed in the election.
On Tuesday, Mr. Starmer tried to offer something of a reset. In a speech to Labour’s annual conference, he vowed to build a new Britain and urged the party faithful not to waver.
“If this path were popular or easy, we could have walked it already,” he said. “There will be no stone left unturned, no innovation ignored and no return to Tory austerity. We will rebuild our public services, protect working people and do this in a Labour way. That is a promise.”
No honeymoon for new U.K. leader Keir Starmer after a summer of unrest
The four-day conference should have been a time for the party to celebrate ending 14 years of Conservative rule by winning 411 seats in the election, the largest majority in 25 years. Instead, Mr. Starmer and several cabinet ministers have been put on the defensive.
They’ve faced questions for weeks about gifts of clothing and concert tickets from party donors.
The Prime Minister received nearly £19,000 ($34,000) worth of clothing and glasses this year, according to parliamentary filings. A major donor also paid for a personal shopper for his wife, Victoria, as well as clothes and alterations. Mr. Starmer was also given four tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, worth £4,000, and he has received £40,000 worth of tickets to Arsenal soccer games since December, 2019.
A heckler is escorted out of the auditorium as Starmer delivers his keynote speech.OLI SCARFF/AFP/Getty Images
He said he has been transparent about the gifts and suggested they were commonplace among politicians. But on Friday he announced that he and other ministers would no longer accept donations of clothes.
The freebie scandal has plagued the government while it’s struggling to defend a decision to cut winter fuel payments to some 10 million low-income seniors, depriving them of about £300.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said the government could no longer afford the payments, blaming the Conservatives for leaving a £22-billion hole in public finances. But critics accused her of hypocrisy after she confirmed that she had received £7,500 worth of clothes from a donor.
“This is something that we did during the election campaign to get ready for government,” Ms. Reeves said this week, referring to the donations while also noting that she declared all the gifts in the parliamentary registry. “It’s not something that I’m going to do in government. I can understand that to a lot of people it looks a bit odd.”
Mr. Starmer did not address the clothing controversy in his speech Tuesday but defended the decision to scrap the winter fuel subsidy. While he acknowledged that people were unhappy with the cut, he said taking tough action now would speed up the country’s progress to “that light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I know, after everything you have been through, how hard it is to hear a politician ask for more. But deep down, I think you also know that our country does need a long-term plan and that we can’t turn back,” he said.
Victoria Honeyman, a professor of British politics at Leeds University, said Mr. Starmer’s uneven start was largely owing to self-inflicted political wounds that come from being out of power for so long.
“They’re going to have to get a grip of this because these little stories will start mounting up,” she said. “You could argue that it’s simply that they haven’t been in government for 14 years, and therefore they’ve come in with a sense of naiveté. That doesn’t excuse them. That isn’t a good narrative.”
She and others noted that part of the problem is that while Labour won a massive number of seats in the House of Commons, the party claimed just 34 per cent of the popular vote, only two percentage points more than in the 2019 election.
“There isn’t a very big cushion there,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, adding that Mr. Starmer has never been especially popular and his approval ratings have fallen even further since the election.
Mr. Starmer “has to come up with a convincing story about how things are going to change,” Dr. Bale said. “At the moment, he hasn’t been able to do that. And to be honest, one speech at a Labour Party conference is not going to be able to make up for the mess they’ve made over the last two or three weeks.”