Sir Keir Starmer is a football fan, so how embarrassing that the Labour leader ranks below a footballer when it comes to effective opposition of the government. Worse than that, even Piers Morgan scores higher than Starmer.
A recent Ipsos MORI poll shows that the British public perceives both Marcus Rashford and Piers Morgan to be doing a better job at holding the government to account for its coronavirus response than the leader of the opposition.
Just 3 in 10 (29 per cent) believe Starmer is taking the government to task for the 100,000+ Covid deaths and 28 per cent say he is doing an outright bad job. Meanwhile, 23-year-old footballer Marcus Rashford is the one truly leading the opposition, with 56 per cent believing he’s been doing a good job. Rashford’s newfound reputation as Boris Johnson’s “number one aggravator” is fairly well-founded; the footballer successfully campaigned for free school meals and continuously uses his social media influence to call the PM out (all in his time off the pitch). Either way, having a 23-year-old with no experience in politics out-performing your job description is still somewhat demeaning for Starmer.
All the more surprising, however, is that 32 per cent (that’s a whole 3 per cent more than Starmer) perceive professional contrarian and Donald Trump friend Piers Morgan to be in second place for holding the government to account. That’s the same Piers Morgan whose Daily Mail byline appears second when you Google “most hated man in Britain”.
In Starmer’s defence, being leader of the opposition is a tough job even outside a pandemic. Now, most of the things he could do to get attention or make progress – make speeches, hold rallies, tour the country, even just meet properly with his team to boost morale – are impossible. He’s locked in a cycle of Zoom meetings and isolation like the rest of us.
Even so, he’ll need to do much better in the second half, post-Covid, if he is to convince the public he can be PM.
