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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 Benjamin Netanyahu or Hamas. At the weekend a far-right march against Starmer’s government in Bristol was met with a leftwing counter-protest bearing the slogan “We hate Keir Starmer more than you”.
Meanwhile the song itself has become a kind of standard, the soundtrack to our lives, perhaps even a unifying balm in troubled times. As well as the darts, you hear it at football grounds up and down the country, in nightclubs at 2am, at music festivals, pretty much anywhere large groups of young people congregate in a public place. In a way it has become this generation’s Ghost Town, its Get Lucky, its Candle in the Wind 1997. Goodbye, England’s wanker.
There have of course been other useless prime ministers in our time: prime ministers who have started wars, killed thousands through neglect or cruelty, plunged millions into poverty, been duplicitous or corrupt, who have been turfed out in disgrace. But with the brief exception of Liz Truss, even the most divisive of them took years to become the focal point of mass rage. Starmer has managed to hit the sweet spot within barely a year. People genuinely, viscerally loathe this guy. Why him? Why now? And why like this?
Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.
Clearly there is a hedonistic, nihilistic element to much of the sloganeering: a performative alpha masculinity that seems to have bled over from far-right spaces, via the sporting arena, into mainstream culture. Travelling football fans up and down the country slap “MORE GEAR LESS KEIR” stickers on trains, benches and lamp-posts. And for these guys Starmer functions as basically the polar opposite of cocaine: sober, quiet, boring, right on, emotionally austere and medically incapable of banter.
But of course these same traits also damn him with the haunted, hope-starved left. Here, Starmer somehow manages to encapsulate a broader revulsion with traditional Westminster politicians – preoccupied with managerialism and triangulation over ideology and morality; the sheer reluctance to define a political mission beyond a vague obsession with “fixing things”, as if Britain were basically a damp garden shed. With Tony Blair you were at least dealing with a human being, someone with a worldview and a discernible set of vertebrae. The reason Starmer makes such an infuriating adversary is because there is basically nothing there to oppose: a low-fat yoghurt standing in front of a union flag.
And so the rage is loud, catholic and inchoate, a buffet at which all are welcome. Whatever sinks your boat, Starmer has something to offer you. Engaging with all the ways in which our system of representative democracy is broken, the macroeconomic currents that disenfranchise entire states, the failures of centrist politics to respond to sweeping technological change and increasing social alienation: hard. Singing loudly about the prime minister’s manual pastimes: easy, and essentially able to make whatever point you want.
It helps, of course, that Starmer rage is basically free. Starmer has no -ism, no natural constituency, no base beyond a couple of dozen weird technocracy stans on Bluesky. It helps, too, that voters have an innate genius for intuiting a politician’s worst fear and squeezing it mercilessly. Part of the reason I think people like kicking Starmer so much is that his entire political journey has been built around getting kicked as little as possible. Virtually everything he does – his piecemeal economic reforms, his cautious rhetoric, his editorials in the Sun – screams “smallest possible target”: “I am mild and inoffensive. Please don’t hate me. Definitely do not sing with complete strangers in public places about me being a wanker.”
And naturally we should be wary, even alarmed, at where this amorphous anger leads us in the long run. At the increasingly coarse and personal tone of our politics, the conflation of legitimate dissent with onanism discourse. But perhaps there is also a certain purifying clarity in this illusory moment of communion. We agree on little as a nation, but this unites us. Throughout history, the howl of change has come in many forms – this one just so happens to have six syllables.
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Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist
