When crowds direct offensive chants at Keir Starmer, who’s to blame? I’m afraid he is |
It’s the world darts championships on the first day of the year, and a well-lubricated early-afternoon audience at London’s Alexandra Palace is belting out one of the more recent additions to its songbook. Up on the stage, the then world No 20, Ryan Searle, briefly extracts himself from his quarter-final match to encourage the crowd, conducting it with his hands and briefly joining in a chorus of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker”.
And the surreal part of all this is that from Searle’s gesture alone, you could scarcely guess what his own politics might be. Was he condemning Starmer from the nativist right or from the progressive left? Pro-farmer or pro-Palestine? Does he think the government’s reforms on workers’ rights go too far or not far enough? Perhaps Searle’s protest might even have come from the Burnhamite centre, less an ideological objection and more an implicit criticism of messaging and delivery.
The hideous beauty of British politics in 2026 is that we have no idea. You think Keir Starmer’s a wanker? Back of the queue’s that way, mate. And of course there is a rich irony in the fact that Starmer took office with the explicit aim of healing our divisions and bringing the country together, rendering this one of the very few election pledges he has actually managed to keep.
His approval ratings, which began to go into freefall from pretty much the moment he moved into Downing Street, have dropped below 20%. A YouGov poll last week found that he was more disliked by Britons than