All governments go through bad patches, when nothing seems to go right and voters turn against them. Often they bounce back from the midterm blues and go on to be comfortably re-elected. That said, Labour’s current unpopularity is in a class of its own. It is not just the scale of its problem, with opinion polls suggesting support for the party has almost halved, from 34% to 18% since the 2024 general election. Nor is it simply the speed at which disillusionment with the government has set in, though that too is unprecedented.

What’s really remarkable is that the public is not normally this negative about a government unless the economy is in the deepest of slumps. If the UK had double-digit unemployment and house prices were crashing, Labour’s political predicament would be a lot easier to explain.

Clearly, 2025 has been a far from vintage year for the economy, but it hasn’t been that bad either. Britain has trundled on in much the same way it has since the global financial crisis of 2008. Economic performance has been mediocre but not disastrous.

True, growth has slowed since a strong start to 2025 and unemployment has edged up. At 5.1%, the jobless rate is a full percentage point higher than when Labour came to power in July 2024, but still a long way short of the levels seen in the deep recessions of the early 1980s and early 1990s. What’s more, for those in work, living standards have been rising, because wage growth has outpaced inflation. Governments normally benefit when........

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