Labour is more popular than it was under Corbyn, but the May elections are not looking good for Starmer

This morning’s batch of opinion polls make gloomy reading for Keir Starmer. Two polls in Scotland put Labour in third place, while a poll in the West Midlands suggests Andy Street, the Conservative mayor, will hold on easily in a contest that Labour ought to win. All against a background of national polls that put the Conservatives on average 10 points ahead.

Savanta ComRes and YouGov both have Labour stuck behind the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives in the Scottish parliament elections. Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour’s new leader, polls well, with a positive rating of 28 points, although 40 per cent of voters say they “don’t know” whether he is doing well or badly. But the party is still a little behind where it was in the last elections five years ago.

The striking feature of Scottish polls is that, if they are right, the parliament is going to look similar to its current state. This is a change from how things looked at the start of the year, when Nicola Sturgeon was heading for a big majority in her own right: now, she may have to rely on support from the Scottish Greens again, and it is not certain that the pro-independence parties (the SNP, Greens and Alex Salmond’s Alba party) will win a majority of votes.

But if Labour slips back from the meagre 24 seats it won last time, it will undermine Starmer’s claim that the party is making progress “under new management”.

At the start of the year, Labour could at least take comfort from predictions that it would make sweeping advances in local elections in England. The biggest prize, the mayoralty of the West Midlands, looked easily within Liam Byrne’s grasp. Andy Street, the former John Lewis boss, only just won the election by the narrowest of margins four years ago, at a time when the Conservatives were so far ahead in the national polls that Theresa May had overcome her instinctive caution and called a general election.

Even now, with Labour trailing the Tories nationally, but not as badly as in 2017, Byrne, a former cabinet minister and an energetic campaigner, ought to win the election easily. But it seems that mayoral contests do not necessarily follow national political trends, because the Redfield & Wilton poll puts Street nine points ahead on first-preference votes, with nothing in the second preferences to suggest that Byrne can overhaul that lead.

If that isn’t bad enough, Labour seems set to lose the Hartlepool by-election, which is being held on the same day. It is rare for the government to gain a seat from the opposition in a by-election, although it happened at Copeland in Cumbria a few months before the 2017 election – a defeat for Jeremy Corbyn that was a warning of the impending collapse of the red wall of northern Labour Leave seats. For the same thing to happen again under Starmer would be an embarrassment, and not what the new Labour leader was hoping for just a few months ago.

At the start of the year, Labour had drawn level with the Tories in the national polls, and Starmer looked forward to the English local elections at least as an easy way to show that Labour had changed and was on the upward path to recovery. By not being Corbyn, he would automatically be more popular, and the 6 May elections would be the first chance to cash in that advantage at the ballot box.

But it has not turned out like that. Labour is still more popular than it was under Corbyn, but not by much. This has little to do with the quality of Starmer’s leadership. The success of the vaccination programme is almost the only thing that matters in national politics at the moment, while in Scotland the only other thing that has moved the market is the feud between Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, her predecessor, in which Sarwar is a bystander.

That national picture has made it easier for Street to stand on his record in the West Midlands: the mayor doesn’t have many powers, but the Redfield & Wilton poll finds that the voters have a positive view of him generally.

Meanwhile, Hartlepool is an anomalous red-wall seat that the Conservatives would have won at the last election if it hadn’t been for a Brexit Party candidate splitting the Leave vote.

So there are reasons that Labour will do badly on 6 May that shouldn’t be held against Starmer, but this is politics, and he will be blamed anyway. No doubt the core group of Corbynite sectarians, who are already talking about a leadership challenge, will continue to do so, but it would require 40 MPs to nominate a candidate against Starmer, so it is not going to happen.

But a set of disappointing results on 6 May is going to mean a longer and slower route to convincing the party, the media and the voters that Labour has a credible chance of winning a general election in what could be just two years’ time.