There are many ways for a prime minister to measure public opinion: polling data, focus groups, constituency surgeries, the editorial pages of national newspapers. Keir Starmer, however, has been granted a far more visceral metric. It echoes through football grounds, darts arenas, nightclubs, and music festivals, carried by the voices of thousands who may agree on little else. The chant is crude, repetitive, and unmistakable. And the uncomfortable truth is that its popularity says far more about Starmer than about the people singing it.
The moment at the World Darts Championship on New Year’s Day captured the strange clarity of the age. As Ryan Searle paused mid-match to conduct the Alexandra Palace crowd in a chorus of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”, the politics of the protest were impossible to pin down. Was this anger coming from the right, the left, or some exhausted, post-ideological middle ground? That uncertainty is precisely the point. The chant works because it is ideologically empty and emotionally full. It can mean anything, which means it belongs to everyone.
This is the paradox of British politics in 2026. Starmer came to power promising unity, calm, and competence after years of chaos. He wanted to drain politics of its fevered drama and restore trust through seriousness. In one narrow sense, he has succeeded. Britain is united – just not in the way he imagined. His approval ratings have collapsed below 20%, and he is now more disliked than figures associated with war and terrorism. Even protests against his government can’t escape the gravitational pull of anti-Starmer sentiment: leftwing demonstrators feel compelled to clarify that they despise him more than the far right marching beside them.
Why Starmer? Why so fast? And why this particular kind of contempt?
Language matters here. When Boris Johnson was serenaded with obscenities during the Partygate scandal, the insult of choice was harsh and venomous, implying moral rot but also a kind of rogue charisma. “Wanker”, by contrast, is smaller, meaner, and more dismissive. It suggests not villainy but feebleness; not danger but irrelevance. It paints Starmer as a man beneath even the dignity of serious hatred.
Part of this is cultural. There is undeniably a strain of laddish nihilism running through modern British public life, amplified by sporting culture and online spaces that prize provocation over coherence. For this crowd, Starmer represents everything antithetical to pleasure: sober, managerial, humorless, risk-averse. He is the opposite of excess, spontaneity, or rebellion. If cocaine had a nemesis, it would look uncomfortably like the prime minister.
But that explanation only goes so far, because the chant resonates just as strongly with people who share none of that macho bravado. On the left, Starmer has come to symbolize a deeper despair with mainstream politics itself. His leadership is seen as bloodless and evasive, obsessed with process rather than purpose. He talks endlessly about “fixing things” without ever articulating what Britain is for, or what moral direction his government represents. The result is a peculiar form of rage: not the fury inspired by an enemy, but the frustration provoked by a void.
Tony Blair, for all the controversy of his years in office, at least had a worldview. You could argue with him, oppose him, loathe him – but you were responding to something tangible. Starmer, by contrast, feels to many like a placeholder, a political non-event wrapped in the symbols of authority. He is not so much wrong as absent. Opposing him feels like punching fog.
That emptiness makes him the perfect vessel for collective anger. Whatever your grievance – economic stagnation, moral cowardice, cultural drift, democratic decay – Starmer can absorb it. He stands in for everything that feels broken about representative politics: the managerial centrism, the obsession with triangulation, the fear of conviction. It is far easier to shout a chant than to untangle the structural failures of capitalism, technology, and governance that have hollowed out public life. Starmer becomes the human shortcut.
Crucially, he offers no resistance. He has no ideological movement behind him, no loyal base, no emotional bond with voters. His political strategy has always been about minimizing risk, making himself the “smallest possible target”. But politics has a cruel logic: the more desperately you try not to be hated, the more satisfying it becomes to hate you. Voters have an instinctive talent for identifying a politician’s deepest fear and pressing on it until it hurts. In Starmer’s case, that fear is ridicule, rejection, and public embarrassment. The chant delivers all three, on a loop.
There is, of course, something troubling about this moment. The coarsening of political discourse, the reduction of dissent to playground insult, the way anger floats free of ideology – none of this bodes well for democratic culture. When contempt becomes the common language, it is easy for more dangerous forces to exploit it.
And yet there is also a bleak kind of honesty in what is happening. Britain is fragmented, exhausted, and deeply uncertain about its future. It lacks shared narratives, shared goals, even shared enemies. The chant offers a fleeting sense of communion, a rare moment of collective feeling. We may agree on nothing else, but for six syllables, we are together.
If Starmer is offended by this, he should reflect on why it feels so accurate to so many. The crowds are not confused. They are responding to what they see – or rather, to what they don’t. And that, more than any single policy failure, is why the blame ultimately lands with him.
Comments