Local elections across England delivered dire results for Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party, as they lost over six hundred council seats, with many of them flipping to Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party. But the results showed that, remarkably, five parties were capable of getting more than fifteen per cent of the total votes cast: Reform, which captured the most seats and leads national polls; Labour; the Conservatives; the left-wing Green Party, which added hundreds of seats under its new leader, Zack Polanski; and the left-of-center Liberal Democrats. (Nationalist parties also did well in parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales.) The next general election needn’t be held until the summer of 2029, but the Labour Party has to decide before then whether it wants to replace the extremely unpopular Starmer as leader, and the left-of-center parties need to decide what, if anything, they can do to prevent Farage from entering Downing Street.

I recently spoke with David Runciman, an honorary professor of politics at Cambridge University and the host of the “Past, Present, Future” podcast. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the fundamental changes we are witnessing in British politics, the reasons Keir Starmer is unlikely to ever recover politically, and why it may be impossible to keep Nigel Farage from being the next Prime Minister.

Do you think this is likely to end up being a really important election for the United Kingdom?

Yeah, I think it will seem like a watershed election because it’s part of a trend that goes back quite some way in the fragmentation of a two-party political system into a multi-party system. Seven parties competed seriously for votes: two nationalist parties, and five national parties, and they all got a chunky vote share. That’s never happened before in British politics. There have been turbulent periods. There have been periods where one of the main parties has been supplanted. But a seven-way party contest in a first-pass-the-post political system has never happened before here, or maybe anywhere, actually. Certainly never in the U.S.

A first-past-the-post system means that you win the seat if you’ve got the most votes. So if it splits five ways, you could win the seat with twenty-one per cent of the vote, if your opponents get just under that. National opinion polls look a little like this at the moment. So you get these very skewed results. You can win quite a lot of seats, as Reform has done in these elections, with twenty-six per cent of the vote or some small share like that.

The easiest way to summarize this is that, in the 2024 general election, Starmer got fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in the 2019 general election. In that election, Corbyn was wiped out by Boris Johnson. But Starmer won almost the biggest majority in British political history with thirty-three per cent of the vote. If the opposition is split and you come out on top under this kind of system, you can do extraordinarily well on relatively few votes, but it creates a lot of instability. And I think part of the reason the Labour government is a fragile government, and has been from Day One, is that voters recognize there’s a mismatch between the power they have in Parliament, and the fact that almost no one voted for them.

And this also explains some of the fear that Reform, which is hovering around the twenties in national polls, could potentially lead the next government, whereas the German far-right party, the AfD, is also polling in the twenties but has no chance to form the next government.

Yeah. Under the German system, the other parties can govern with each other, and agree among themselves that they won’t let the AfD into government. Under the British system, it’s up to the voters to work this out. If you don’t want a Reform government, you have to decide in your individual constituency who is most likely to beat them. And the voters are pretty good at this. They’re pretty shrewd. But it’s not a foolproof system at all. And of course, not all voters are thinking in those terms when they vote. So there is a real fear that with an even lower share of votes than Labour got last time, Reform could win a large majority.

What is the Reform Party right now? Farage has had different incarnations in his career and has led different types of political parties, but where do you see Reform on the spectrum of other right-wing nationalist parties?

Farage has been through various guises. But like all of Farage’s parties, Reform is very much his party. He absolutely dominates it. In the earlier guises, his parties had a single issue: Get Britain out of the European Union. Once that was successful, he then pivoted to Reform, making it essentially an anti-immigration party. That’s complicated now in Britain because net migration has fallen dramatically, and although that fact hasn’t quite filtered through to the electorate, it’s starting to filter through. It’s much harder to make the anti-immigration case now. And so he’s pivoted to turning Reform into a climate-skeptic party. It’s still an anti-immigration party for sure. It’s also an anti-welfare party; there’s quite a lot of rhetoric about paring back the welfare state.

But the really interesting thing with Reform is that about six months ago, they clearly thought they had a chance of replacing the Conservatives. They were riding high in the polls. The Conservatives looked very weak. Kemi Badenoch, their leader, had had a very rocky start after succeeding former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. And Farage started doing the thing he said he’d never do, which is recruiting former Tory politicians into his ranks, and it damaged him. These were people associated with the failed governments of Theresa May and Boris Johnson and, God forbid, Liz Truss. And it made Reform look like a sort of warmed-up, or not even warmed-up, Conservative party. And I think he’s recognized that was a mistake. And in these elections, he’s gone back to what he does best, which is making it about Farage and a kind of rabble-rousing populist politics.

And it’s very effective, but it has a ceiling. If he could replace the Conservative Party and get forty per cent of the vote, he would be Prime Minister. And this kind of populism probably takes him maximally to thirty per cent of the vote, which could be enough.

Trump’s behavior has sometimes hurt other right-wing parties, most notably in the Canadian election last year. And some right-wing leaders in Europe have distanced themselves from Trump after the Iran war. Trump is very unpopular in Britain. Are you surprised that Trump’s behavior and unpopularity don’t hurt someone like Farage more? Maybe it’s naïve, but I am a little surprised that Trump is so universally disliked around the world, and yet that hasn’t hurt the electoral success of more right-wing parties.

I don’t think it’s naïve. I think it’s a really difficult question to answer. And Farage is a good example of this. There have been countless points in the last ten years where Farage has been very close to Trump at a time when Trump has been deeply unpopular in British politics. Initially, Farage came out in support of the Iran war. He’s since backtracked on that. But the Labour Party thought this would damage him. Somehow it never has. And it should also be said, Trump is unpopular with Reform voters, too. I just think, in his case, and it’s probably different with some other leaders, it has to do with the fact that he is now such a fixture in British politics. He’s been around for the best part of three decades. In some ways, he’s the most consequential politician in Britain since Tony Blair. And there’s nothing new to find out about him. It’s all baked in. There’ve been lots of attempts in the last few months to move the dial on Farage. The Guardian ran a series of stories about the fact that Farage, when he was at school, was a kind of neo-Nazi. But none of it seems to have touched him. There is a ceiling. A politician with that baggage is not going to gather all the votes on the right. He’s still too unpopular.

But one of the things that’s interesting is that a couple of weeks before the election, Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens, got into a difficult situation after an attack on two Jewish people in London. He got into a rhetorical fight with the Metropolitan Police and he was widely criticized. [Polanski falsely claimed that the suspect was kicked in the head while already handcuffed.] The Green Party was clearly damaged by that, because Polanski’s not a known quantity. He’s a new face on the block. People projected qualities onto him, and then they were very disappointed to discover who he really is. Farage is so beyond that.

It may be because he’s a known quantity, but it’s also a question of whether the slice of right-wing voters who support Reform just don’t care about the mainstream media or whoever else is reporting this type of stuff about Farage.

Yeah, sure. I think that slice of voters is never going to be that upset about what the Guardian is reporting. And the British media is still predominantly right wing, and it’s dominated by two or three titles, including the Daily Mail. They’ve been going after Polanski recently. So, yeah, there is a Teflon quality to Farage, and he’s like Trump in a way, if you survive what would be for other politicians near-death experiences, there’s a point at which you just seem impervious to it.

Also, Polanski’s got a much more difficult coalition to build. They have done pretty well, but I think the Green Party will be a little disappointed with the result. And it’s difficult because he is actually trying to knit together a coalition that includes one big chunk of votes that he’s taken away from Labour, which is Muslim voters. That’s where he’s made huge inroads, and he’s done it by essentially making Gaza a Green campaign issue. He has said Palestine is on the ballot in local elections, which are mostly about garbage collection and potholes in the roads. And that’s been very successful for him with that group, but it makes it much harder for him to win a wider, softer, environmentally conscious electorate that do get put off by some of the hard-edged, Corbynite politics.

It is also the case that on the left, you’re more vulnerable in the media environment. But the Farage coalition is not complicated. It is, essentially, mostly alienated white voters in parts of the country that they feel, to use the cliché, have been left behind. That is a less complicated coalition than a coalition that includes inner-city Muslim voters, traditional liberal environmentalists, students, and people who are sick of the Labour Party and are looking around for someone new to vote for. So there’s a different challenge on the left than on the right for structural reasons as well as for media-climate reasons.

Why is Starmer so unpopular? It seems hard to analyze, because while he is clearly not a good politician, the vast majority of incumbents in Western countries are extremely unpopular, so it seems a little silly to look too closely at the specifics of each case.

It is the great question of British politics, and apparently, inside Downing Street, they puzzle over this on a daily basis, too. No one can quite understand it, but as you say, it would be a mistake to think this is a British problem with British causes. Friedrich Merz in Germany is more unpopular than Starmer, which is quite something. He doesn’t seem like a politician who is going to rub everyone the wrong way. Starmer does seem to rub everyone the wrong way. So I think there are a few things going on here. One is this mismatch between the kind of power and ostensible political authority that Starmer has and the size of his vote. If you put a hundred people in a room who were eligible to vote in 2024, only twenty of them would have voted for the Labour Party. They won roughly a third of the turnout, which wasn’t much more than half of the electorate. And he is tone-deaf to that, and he has a sanctimonious quality, a self-satisfied quality. He really does personally seem to rub people the wrong way. It’s not just that he’s a bit wooden and humorless and a little robotic in the way he comes across. You can survive that, but it’s a really bad combination to be those things and also to come across as exuding a certain kind of moral self-satisfaction.

And governing is really hard. Governing in the world that Donald Trump has created is really hard. Starmer thought that he turned a corner at the beginning of the year, and if he could get through the year, the British economy might pick up. Well, that’s all been put to bed by the Iran war. We’re looking at rising inflation and rising interest rates, plus the bond markets are rising, putting the British economy into a precarious place. We’re a couple of missteps away from a real financial crisis, and there’s not much he can do. His party won’t let him do the things that he wants to do, like reform welfare. So he looks powerless despite this big majority.

It will look like he has survived this round of elections for a day, a week, a month, maybe a year, maybe even a couple of years. But recovery from here for him looks really hard. He’s at that level that politicians reach where I don’t think that the brand can recover, and the Labour Party’s aware of that, which is why whatever they might be saying today and tomorrow, they are looking very hard at replacing him. But it’s hard to see who they would replace him with.

Whatever one’s ideological perspective on Starmer, he has seemed to govern as if he doesn’t have to protect his left flank. You can maybe do this as a Democrat in a two-party system, like in the U.S., but Starmer has seemed to govern like someone who was almost unaware that he could hemorrhage major, major votes on his left.

I think that’s right. And I think one of the explanations for that might be that Starmer’s original mission was to rescue the Labour Party from the clutches of the Corbynites. And he did that relatively successfully within the Party. He regained control of the Party machinery, its bureaucratic structures, and its selection of candidates. So the Labour Party’s really not a Corbynite Party at all, and Jeremy Corbyn himself is out. He is in the process of trying to set up a new party called Your Party, which is going nowhere. But it’s as though they didn’t notice that what happened during that time was that a large chunk of the electorate simply moved to the Greens.

And then the really significant moment was when Zach Polanski, who more or less came out of nowhere, won the leadership of the Green Party and essentially turned it into a Corbynite Party. Its platform is hard to distinguish from Corbynism, and many of the people who advised Corbyn are now advising Zach Polanski. So it’s almost as though Starmer thought, I’ve got the Labour Party back. So we’ve achieved the mission. We’re a two-party system. There’s no one else to vote for. And he didn’t notice that this split had already happened, and in some ways, now he doesn’t know how to bring it back. He is also slightly hamstrung by the fact that he’s got this huge majority in Parliament mainly made up of members who are to the left of him, many of whom know they’re going to lose their seats at the next election and feel, well, if we’re only here for five years, we didn’t come into politics to abandon our principles, and we’re going to go down standing for what we believe in.

We haven’t talked much about them, but what is the Tory Party in 2026?

It’s in better shape than it was in 2025 in that it elected Badenock, and while she was awful to start with, she’s found her feet. She’s actually quite a charismatic politician, and she’s quite good as a campaigner. She’s currently the most popular of all of the party leaders by some distance, but her problem is that the party brand is toxic. Starmer’s problem is that he’s toxic. But the Conservative Party is not dead. It’s not going to be back in government anytime soon, but it’s doing enough to stop Farage from simply cleaning up on the right. The Conservatives still appeal to wealthier voters, voters in the South of England, and retired voters. With Reform, it’s a different, more Northern demographic, and it looks quite frozen, which means British politics in that respect is frozen. No one can win, but also no one is getting wiped out.

If Labour’s brand is not toxic, what will it mean if it can get a new leader? Can it make some sort of alliance with the other left parties to prevent Reform from getting into power?

Starmer is lucky in that there are three plausible alternatives to him as leader, and all of them are, in different ways, stymied. One of them is a man called Wes Streeting, who is a young, charismatic politician, but is also very closely associated with Peter Mandelson, and Peter Mandelson is the man who had to resign as U.K. Ambassador to the court of Donald Trump because of his associations with Jeffrey Epstein. So Mandelson is now very bad news for anyone, and that means Streeting’s bid is probably over. Another candidate, Angela Rayner, had to resign because of complications with her tax affairs that haven’t quite been resolved. So she’s somewhat on the sidelines. And then by far the strongest rival, a man called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of the Greater Manchester area, has been a very successful mayor electorally, and, anecdotally, people in Manchester seem happy with him. But Burnham, while a successful young Cabinet minister, is not an M.P. He’s a mayor, and he would have to get back into the House of Commons. And one of the things that last night’s results showed is that nowhere is safe for Labour. They could try and find a seat to get him in. But first, Starmer would have to allow him to do that, and, last time, Starmer blocked him. Even then, there’s no guarantee that he would win that seat. So Starmer is kept in place by the fact that these three are all damaged. If any one of them were not in that situation, I think Starmer would be gone, which is a slightly nightmarish position for the Labour Party. I suspect that the only plausible replacement is Burnham, but it’s a long route back.

Interestingly, if Burnham were the leader, one of the things that he has let be known is that he would move quite quickly to a system of proportional representation. So he would change the first-past-the-post system so that seats in the House of Commons would be allocated by vote share or something else. And if you pool them all together, there may be a bigger share on the left than on the right. So you would maybe end up with a coalition in which, say, Burnham was Prime Minister but the Liberal Democrats and the Greens and maybe some Scottish nationalists would put together a government under a proportional-representation system. Under that system, that would certainly be possible, and it would look like the best way to guarantee no chance of a Reform government.

But this could be a tough thing to do. Parties might not want to give up on winning outright. And there will not be a formal coalition. Sometimes there is talk of parties standing down in favor of others. And Boris Johnson, in 2019, benefitted from this in that Farage’s then party, the Brexit Party, agreed to stand down in seats being contested by Brexit-favoring Conservative candidates, and that helped Boris Johnson enormously. But on the left, there is no real history of parties standing down for each other. There’s a lot of mutual mistrust. Probably the Greens and the Labour Party loathe each other more than any other two parties in Britain. In some ways, it’s easier to see a Conservative-Reform government emerging in a Parliament where no party has a majority than a coalition on the left.

So there is an interesting path for British politics now, potentially, to change the voting system to create what looks like a more durable coalition on the left. But I’d say it’s unlikely it will happen in this Parliament, in which case we are more likely to see a result in the next general election that looks a bit like the results of these elections. And under those circumstances, it would take a brave person to tell you who is going to be the next Prime Minister. ♦