Last week’s episode on The Rest is Politics podcast heard two of the country’s most astute centrists stumped by the question: how does a Prime Minister who comes across as a “slightly disappointing accountant” become the focus of such visceral and personal loathing?

It’s a fair question. The chant “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” has been echoing in stadiums and darts arenas across the country. The overwhelming experience of Labour doorstep canvassers was a palpable feeling of targeted dislike. This goes beyond apathy and disappointment and feels like a rejection of the man’s entire being.

You might expect a John Major outcome, an uninspiring leader who generates mild dissatisfaction and low turnout. But Starmer has cultivated something more electric, personal and somewhat impressive given the dryness of his demeanour. So where is it coming from?

I think psychology provides some needed understanding.

Smoke and Mirrors

Keir Starmer is by no means a master manipulator, and that is paradoxically the problem. His deceptions don’t go unnoticed, and the residue they leave is a nagging, unresolved feeling that provides fertile ground for hatred.

As humans we are wired to sense inauthenticity, and we instinctively recoil in the face of it. This goes beyond modern day political hypersensitivity, it’s a deep evolutionary instinct. Spotting dishonesty evolved when belonging to a cohesive society was a matter of survival. Not to mention that throughout history the fake performance of loyalty has always been more dangerous and unpredictable than an outward and open enemy.

We humans have developed automatic, subconscious mechanisms for detecting people who signal one thing and mean another. This is an alarm system built to protect social cohesion. And something about Keir Starmer reliably trips it and the distinct smell of a rat wafts out of Downing Street periodically.

The reason hatred toward him is hard to pin down is that the mechanism fires before we can explain it. Paul Slovic’s ‘affect heuristic’ shows that emotional impressions form significantly faster than rational explanations for them. So the gut read of Starmer comes first and the justification is assembled after. Which is precisely why when Labour canvassers ask people why they hate Starmer a plethora of unrelated explanations come to the fore.

This visceral feeling is triggered by subliminal cues like tone, delivery and the subtle inconsistency between the things he says. This thread of dishonesty, however thin, feels like a gut punch to our primal nervous systems.

Starmer’s reputation for inauthenticity calls to mind the Game of Thrones character Petyr Baelish or ‘Littlefinger’. Baelish’s particular distastefulness comes from the fact you cannot locate his actual allegiance. He appears perfectly aligned with whoever he’s speaking to, while serving only himself.

Starmer’s relationship with the Labour left tells a similar story. He won the leadership in 2020 by tactically aligning himself with the Corbyn movement, promoting ten socialist pledges and positioning himself as a continuity candidate. Once in power, he ditched the pledges, neutralised the left, and repositioned the party closer to the centre. Align, reassure, acquire, discard. Very Baelish.

In the end, Starmer has managed to alienate almost everyone. Across 13 major reversals and u-turns, his attempt to thread the needle and keep every faction on side has produced its inevitable result. He has pleased no one. He carries around a broken political weathervane rather than a reliable political compass. The fence-sitter’s great miscalculation is the belief that neutrality is safe.

We have all been left wondering what the man actually believes and what he stands for. Research on trust shows that people will more readily accept outcomes they disagree with, provided they trust the framework behind the decision. Without a clear understanding, suspicion fills the gap.

Starmer’s posture towards Trump and Putin has leant towards accommodation, softening and angling himself favourably with whoever holds the most immediate power. What might charitably be called pragmatic diplomacy reads, to most people as a man who bends to any wind, as long as the wind is blowing somewhere personally useful. It’s cowardice imitating statecraft, and the public, whatever you might say about them, tend to know the difference.

No Moral Fibre

Keir Starmer is a former human rights lawyer. He argued at the International Court of Justice that acts Serbia conducted during the 1991-1995 conflict with Croatia met the legal threshold for genocide. He built a large part of his political identity on moral seriousness and integrity, and he used that identity to win power.

This matters enormously, because of a phenomenon psychologists call ‘moral credentialing’. When someone establishes a strong moral identity upfront, subsequent violations are judged far more harshly than if they’d made no such claim.

In October 2023, Starmer backed Israel’s right to withhold water and electricity from Gaza, a man who had argued before the world’s highest court that siege warfare and deliberate destruction of civilian life constituted genocide. When parliament voted on a ceasefire shortly afterwards, with over 10,000 Palestinians already dead, he instructed his party to abstain. His eventual partial arms embargo, which covered less than 10% of all arms exports, managed the remarkable feat of angering both sides simultaneously.

Compare this to John Major, who, despite being boring, read as a decent prime minister who got on with things. There was a dignity to the ordinariness. Starmer has not been granted the same mercy. Major never claimed the moral high ground, while Starmer erected a monument on it.

So when the country is crying out hate chants and as his own MPs sharpen their knives, it’s difficult to feel sorry for him. He constructed the very standard by which he is now being judged.

In His Defence

A lot of Starmer’s visceral unpopularity may simply be the reality of governing a fractured country with an empty purse, crumbling public services, and a brutal media culture.

Psychology calls this ‘fundamental attribution error’ and it’s one of the most robust and replicated findings in social psychology. It shows that people consistently over-attribute behaviour to character and under-attribute it to circumstance.

We are, in other words, wired to see a person where there is often just a situation. Some of the hatred directed at Starmer almost certainly reflects this error. Governing is genuinely hard and no prime minister in these times would be getting an easy run.

Conclusion

While Starmer governs in genuinely difficult circumstances, and some of what he receives is simply the product of that fact, he cannot hide behind it entirely. The hatred directed at him is not solely a rational response to his policy record, it is a pre-rational one, fired by ancient social machinery built to protect us from a certain type of person. Those who perform trustworthiness without embodying it. Beyond that, he is failing his own moral tests. He won power with a moral standard he set and has subsequently defied it completely. The public doesn’t feel let down by a politician. They feel deceived by a person. Whether our collective psychological machinery is reading him correctly is, in some sense, beside the point. The alarm is sounding, the crowd is chanting, and the clock is ticking.