1 It’s the geography, stupid: the nation simply no longer wants a London lawyer at the helm.

Labour has never had a Leader from the north of England since Harold Wilson stepped down as prime minister in 1976. James Callaghan was a Portsmouth man representing a Welsh seat; Foot and Kinnock were sons of Plymouth and south Wales, also representing Welsh seats. John Smith and Gordon Brown were Scotsmen through and through. While Blair and Miliband represented northern seats (and Blair had been spent most of his early years in Durham and Scotland) they were essentially perceived as Londoners. One of Jeremy Corbyn’s many mistakes as Labour leader was to allow himself to be perceived as a Londoner as well (in fact, he was brought up in Shropshire, on the borders of the West Midlands conurbation: an interesting backstory he utterly failed to capitalise on).

The long and the short of it is that no Labour leader has had a recognisably Midland or northern identity, or a northern accent, for more than 50 years.  Despite lots of Labour northerners in senior positions, both in opposition and in government, the sense of the north being left behind has been reinforced by a succession of leaders who come from down south. Starmer’s woodenness, and his maddeningly over-heated mantras about being the son of (Surrey) toolmaker, did nothing to correct this impression. As just about every account of the Makerfield by-election campaign has told us, Starmer is not just distrusted or misunderstood by northern voters: he is actively hated. Likewise in large parts of the Midlands, Wales, and Scotland, where Labour’s results in May were even worse than in the North.

2 Style matters just as much as substance. It always has. Starmer was simply a hopeless communicator from the word go

Picture Keir Starmer in your mind’s eye. It’s impossible to see him in any guise other than wearing either a navy-blue or crisp white shirt (normally with a tailored suit, but occasionally with a hi-vis jacket and hard hat on factory visits), standing like a statue behind a lectern, flanked by Union Jacks. His strangely immovable coiffure sits above a pair of eyes that betray no emotion other than nervousness. Starmer was, and always will be, a decent man who gives passable set-piece speeches, but he is simply woeful at human interactions with strangers. Other Labour prime ministers – Brown comes to mind – countered these personal weaknesses with good political communications: clear policies explained in palatable soundbites. It is difficult to think of a single political soundbite of the last two years that will linger in the memory. It has just been one managerial message after another.

As Jonathan Hinder, Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe, told The Times frankly a few days ago, “The sense you pick up from conversations with voters is that Keir simultaneously doesn’t stand for anything and yet is incredibly sanctimonious, his style embodying the HR proceduralism that people can’t stand from their workplace.” One of the tragedies of his premiership is that, much like like Theresa May, the very first time Starmer showed any genuine emotion was at the very end of his resignation speech. There are many reasons for Starmer’s demise, but is it trite to say that his lack of emotional intelligence was a large one?

3 Britain does not like U-turns. Starmer should have stuck to his guns on inheritance tax, welfare reform and winter fuel payments

Labour communications problems have been inextricably linked to policy ones. Any government needs to have a clear story to tell. For this Labour one it should have been a clear story of economic stability, ethical integrity, and national renewal. In nearly two years it only clearly articulated the first of those three things. On the economy, stagnant growth, an ongoing crisis in the cost of living, and a lack of clarity about what economic growth is for blunted the modest successes, such as growth being not quite as bad as other G7 nations. Even right-wing government like Thatcher’s didn’t just present economic growth as an end in itself. Instead, Thatcher saw economic growth as a means to an an end: a path to greater individual freedom, and responsibility. How ironic that a Labour government, elected with a huge majority 35 years after her demise, could fail to articulate the kind of society that a strong economy could bring about.

Starmer’s government’s ethical integrity – aways shaky – was shredded by the Mandelson debacle. Its story of nation renewal was always muddled and unclear: it even failed to clearly communicate the good news about railway renationalisation, renters’ rights, child poverty and the employment rights act. Everything else was lost in endless talk about “missions”, “milestones”, and impenetrable jargon such as “family support hubs” which only policy wonks understand or appreciate.

Above all, Labour has u-turned on all the wrong things. It should have stuck to its guns on inheritance tax for farmers (whatever the NFU says, most genuine “family farms” are run by tenant farmers, with no estate to inherit). It should also have gone ahead with its plan to means-test winter fuel payments for pensioners. The problem is that it was presented as an isolated money-saving measure, not as part of a wider package of [policies to redistribute money from pensioners (many of whom are very well off) to their grandchildren (many of whom pay a fortune in rent, are saddled with student debts and struggle to find jobs). Blair or Brown could, and would, have sold cuts in winter fuel payments as part of a “New Deal” style package, taking money from some people and redistributing it to others. Much of the political damage from winter fuel was inflicted by the u-turn and the impression of weakness it created, not the decision to means-test winter fuel payments itself (my own minority opinion is that it was the right policy, but catastrophically presented). On welfare reform, a more competent Number Ten should have been able to persuade Labour MPs that incentivising work should be a core mission of any Labour government. But Starmer’s woeful Number Ten operation was never up such a task.

4 May’s local elections results weren’t quite as bad for Labour as expected. Especially not in Starmer’s London backyard.

The May local elections were a disaster for Labour. But not quite as big as disaster as had been feared. Nationally Labour lost about 1,500 council seats: considerably less than the 2,000 losses that many expected. And because those losses were mostly concentrated in the north, Scotland and Wales, their psychological impact on Starmer and his advisors was less than it should have been.

While Labour did catastrophically badly in the Midlands and the North, losing almost all seats that were up for grabs in places like Barnsley and Sunderland, it did a lot better down south. In London, Labour lost several boroughs in south and east London, full of young left-leaning voters who turned to the Greens (Hackney, Lewisham, Southwark, Lambeth and Waltham Forest). But it held Greenwich, where the Greens’ gains stopped short of threatening Labour’s grip on the council (even though they ran Labour remarkably close in places like Woolwich and Abbey Wood, where the Labour vote is normally weighed, not counted). Remarkably, Blackheath Westcombe ward, the ultra-original Greenwich ward that I used to represent until 2014, still returned three Labour councillors, who came through the middle in a three-way fight with the Greens and Tories. That Labour held council seats in leafy London suburbs like Blackheath, while losing them hand-over-fist in places like Barnsley and Sunderland, tells you all you need to know about Labour’s troubles. There is a blog post to be written about why, despite a woeful manifesto that promised free bikes for teenagers (a good policy in principle, but an indulgent gimmick during a cost-of-living crisis), Labour did better in Greenwich than almost any other east London borough: another time.

Further west and north in London, Labour held many boroughs that it had been expected to lose (Camden – where Starmer’s constituency lies – Hammersmith and Fulham, Hounslow and Merton). Labour only lost control for Wandsworth by a single seat: a remarkably good result for Labour in any year, and an astonishing one in 2026. In boroughs like these, without a strong Lib Dem or Green presence, Labour’s support held up remarkably well. Public-sector workers and middle-class professionals – people like Starmer himself, in other words – still voted Labour in large numbers. At the same time, Reform underperformed dramatically in London, winning control of only Havering (which psychologically and geographically, sees itself as part of Essex, not Greater London), and coming nowhere near winning its three other targets: Barking and Dagenham, Bexley and Bromley. These silver linings for Labour were few, but because they were in London they were probably magnified in the eyes of Number Ten staffers.

This explains why Starmer didn’t resign straight after the local elections in May. Labour’s results got better the nearer to London – and to Starmer’s political comfort zone – they were declared from. If Labour had lost almost all London boroughs (as it did in 1968, another mid-term disaster), Starmer might have resigned immediately. But many of Labour’s worst results were in distant towns: out of sight, out of mind. Inside Number Ten, despair over the results would have been leavened by relief that Labour held many of its London boroughs, and that Reform struggled to do well beyond the “red wall” and left-behind coastal towns. Reform picked up many county councils and unitaries in the Midlands in 2025 (including my home county, Northamptonshire), an in 2026 it won several more in the West Midlands conurbation. But the Midlands are just as overlooked by the London media as the North is, and Labour’s disastrous results in places like Sandwell and Walsall were under-reported. If anything, Starmer got off lightly in the election post mortem, as Labour’s worst results were all far from the capital.

Since his by-election triumph, Andy Burnham has introduced the “Makerfield test”: anything a Labour government does has to improve – and be seen to improve – the life-chances of people in northern towns that most people like Starmer have never heard of. For Starmer, a Maida Vale test seems to have applied: his policies seemed tailored for Labour’s winning coalition in London, not the Midlands, Wales, Scotland or the North.

Burnham has his work cut out. But if he succeeds – and  I pray that he will – being born in Liverpool and representing a seat in Greater Manchester will go a long way to help.