Keir Today, Gone Tomorrow?
When the bookies, the pollsters, and his own MPs all agree you're finished - you're probably finished.
You want to know when a politician’s truly done? When the bookies start taking bets on their resignation. Not the pundits - those parasites get paid whether they’re right or wrong. Not the pollsters - they’re just measuring which way the wind’s blowing. The bookies. Because bookies have skin in the game. Real money. And when real money starts flowing one direction, you’d better pay attention.
Right now, William Hill has Keir Starmer at one-to-three odds to resign in 2026. That’s a seventy percent probability he’s done before Christmas. Ninety-three percent of actual bets back him to quit this year. On Polymarket, his exit probability jumped from fifty-one to sixty-five percent in forty-eight hours.
The coffin’s already built. Starmer’s lying in it. He’s just still breathing.
What happened in those forty-eight hours? Peter Mandelson - the Prince of Darkness himself, resigned from government twice, documented Epstein connections - gets appointed US Ambassador. And suddenly everyone realised what they’d been smelling wasn’t normal incompetence. It was a government decomposing in real time.
The Absent Prime Minister: 300 Miles Per Day
The man’s spent one-sixth of his premiership on aeroplanes. Thirty-eight international trips to twenty-nine countries in seven months. Three hundred miles per day. Nearly double what Tony Blair managed after his 1997 landslide. His own cabinet nicknamed him “Never-Here Keir.”
You don’t attend your own political funeral if you’re never in the country. But the service carries on without you.
Because being Prime Minister is actual work. Sitting in rooms with civil servants who know more than you do. Knocking heads together between departments that hate each other. Facing your own MPs who think you’re getting it wrong. Dealing with the reality that governing Britain is like trying to repair a sinking ship whilst the crew argues about the colour of the lifeboats.
But playing statesman? That’s the dream. Fly somewhere nice. Shake important hands. Say something vague about “international cooperation” that means absolutely nothing. Then fly home and let some poor junior minister deal with the mess.
Except when you’re gone one-sixth of the time, you’re not leaving the mess behind. You’re creating it through pure absence. Every trip abroad is another nail in the coffin.
Thirteen U-Turns in Seven Months: Nailing the Lid Shut.
Winter fuel payments. National Insurance hikes. Welfare reforms. Two-child benefit cap. Farmers’ inheritance tax. Digital ID scheme. Grooming gangs inquiry. Business rates for pubs. Thirteen major reversals in seven months. Same pattern every time: announce policy, provoke rebellion, scramble to reverse course, lose more authority.
One Labour MP told journalists: “We’re constantly being marched up the hill to defend positions we think are wrong, only for Keir to U-turn and make us look like fools.”
Each U-turn is another nail. Thirteen nails in seven months.
Professor Philip Cowley identified why this death spiral won’t stop: “Once MPs realise Number 10 will buckle under pressure, they put the pressure on.” The more Starmer caves, the more emboldened his critics become. Weakness feeding on weakness until there’s nothing left.
Small decisions - announcing policies without proper consultation, being absent when groundwork needs laying, buckling under the first sign of pressure - creating disproportionate effects. Miss the groundwork, get the rebellion. Cave once, invite the next challenge.
Minus Sixty Percent: The Funeral Congregation Arrives.
His approval rating sits at minus sixty percent. That’s the British public deciding that if Donald Duck had been on the ballot, they’d have ticked the box for the cartoon waterfowl. At least Donald’s got the decency to be honestly angry instead of performing sincerity like a man perpetually on the verge of tears.
Minus sixty percent. That’s not a political setback - that’s the congregation filing into the chapel. They’re just waiting for someone to officially close the lid.
May 2025: The Dress Rehearsal.
Reform UK won six hundred and seventy-seven seats. Forty-one percent of everything contested. Labour won ninety-eight. Six percent. The lowest proportion Labour’s managed in over twenty years.
Project those results nationally: Reform gets thirty-two percent. Labour nineteen percent. Down from thirty-four the year before. That’s not a bad night - that’s the undertaker taking measurements.
Gorton and Denton: The Funeral Preview.
Before May’s mass burial, there’s a dress rehearsal on February twenty-sixth. The Gorton and Denton by-election.
Labour won this seat in 2024 with fifty percent of the vote. Should be safe. Except Andy Burnham - Greater Manchester’s most popular politician, former Labour Health Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury - wanted to stand. Starmer banned him.
Burnham’s been there and done it. He knows how government works because he’s run government departments. He’s got the ministerial experience, the institutional knowledge, the connection with voters that Starmer only dreams about. And Starmer said no.
Why? Because Burnham might actually win. Because having Burnham succeed where Starmer’s failing would make the comparison too obvious, too brutal, too undeniable. Better to risk losing the seat than let someone competent show up the man lying in the political coffin.
That’s not strategy - that’s a dying man’s paranoia.
May 2026: Three Months Until Burial.
Now we’re three months from May 2026. All thirty-two London borough councils up for grabs. Thirty-two metropolitan boroughs. Over four thousand seats. Scottish Parliament. Welsh Senedd. Same day.
Current polling: Reform thirty-one percent. Conservatives twenty-one percent. Labour seventeen percent. Third place. Behind the Conservatives - the party that spent years imploding through concentrated incompetence.
Only thirty-eight percent of people who voted Labour in 2024 still support them. The rest have scattered. The pallbearers are getting into position.
The Greens, Reform, and the Impossible Choice.
The Greens are surging but they’re about as prepared to govern as I am to perform open-heart surgery. Take Hannah Spencer, their bubble-headed, bleached blonde, Gorton and Denton candidate. When asked about political violence in Manchester - a major local issue - she couldn’t identify what recent incident the interviewer meant. Couldn’t articulate her own party leader’s position. Just waffled.
Former Labour MP Simon Danczuk: “The good people of Gorton and Denton deserve better than this. She has no knowledge of a recent major incident, what her leader has said, and she’s totally inarticulate, just waffling on.”
A candidate who came fifth in the 2024 mayoral race with seven percent. The Greens will attend the funeral. They’ll even give the eulogy. But they won’t bury the body because they’ve never learned how to dig - except to dig themselves into an even deeper political hole.
Reform UK? Different story. They’ve got actual ex-Tory ministers now. People who’ve sat in cabinet. People who understand how Whitehall works. They’re not walking into government like tourists. They’ve got institutional knowledge. They know where the bodies are buried because they helped bury some of them.
That’s what makes this dangerous. Labour’s haemorrhaging support to a party that’s gone from insurgent outsiders to credible gravediggers with actual shovels.
Sir John Curtice: The Man Who Predicted the Funeral Date.
Sir John Curtice doesn’t guess - he calculates. Back in February 2024, before Labour even won, Curtice predicted Starmer would “be in trouble” within eighteen months. He said Labour “hasn’t won the hearts and minds of the country.” His exact words: “There’s no enthusiasm for Starmer and that’s potentially a problem.”
Eighteen months from July 2024 is January 2026. We’re past that now.
Now he’s saying Scottish Labour has “virtually zero chance” at Holyrood. He’s noting that poor May results would “sharpen scrutiny of strategy, priorities and ultimately leadership.”
Leadership. When Curtice uses that word, it’s a polite academic way of saying “start planning the funeral.”
The Bookmaker’s Verdict.
William Hill at one-to-three odds for a 2026 resignation. Ninety-three percent of all bets backing Starmer to quit this year. Polymarket traders giving him sixty-five percent probability of exit by December.
When Curtice predicts and the bookies agree and the polling confirms and your approval rating hits minus sixty and you’ve banned your most popular regional figure from standing - you’re not watching political turbulence. You’re watching the final arrangements being made.
Here’s Labour’s impossible bind. They won’t remove him before May without looking as chaotic as the Tories they replaced. They won’t keep him because he’s bleeding support everywhere. After May - assuming the catastrophic results everyone’s predicting - summer becomes the execution window. MPs return to constituencies, hear from angry voters, realise their own seats are vulnerable. The knives come out.
The smart money doesn’t lie. It doesn’t hope. It doesn’t spin. It calculates cold probability based on available evidence.
And right now, all that evidence says the same thing: Keir Starmer’s lying in his political coffin, still breathing, whilst everyone waits for someone to finally close the lid.
The People Left Behind.
Spare a thought for the people of Gorton and Denton. They’re not choosing between good options. They’re choosing between the best of the worst.
Labour’s second-choice candidate because Starmer blocked the competent one. The Greens’ well-meaning amateur who doesn’t know the major issues in her own constituency. Reform’s machine with ministerial experience but policies half the electorate finds unpalatable.
That’s not democracy thriving - that’s democracy on life support. When your choices come down to “absent incompetence,” “hopeless idealism,” or “competent extremism,” you’re not selecting a representative. You’re picking which flavour of disappointment you prefer.
The people of Gorton and Denton deserve better. They deserve candidates who know the issues, understand how government works, and actually give a damn. Instead, they’re getting the political equivalent of choosing between a broken lift, a ladder with missing rungs, or stairs that lead nowhere.
But that’s where we are. That’s what Starmer’s collapse has delivered. A by-election where nobody wins because everybody loses.
The funeral’s already scheduled. The people of Gorton and Denton just get to choose who delivers the eulogy.
The bookies are taking bets on exactly when the coffin gets closed. And the odds say it’ll be before Christmas.
SOURCES & CITATIONS:
William Hill betting odds, Polymarket data, Keir Starmer travel statistics (UK Government/BBC), Cabinet sources (The Times), Government U-turns (Institute for Government), Professor Philip Cowley (University of Nottingham), YouGov approval ratings, May 2025 election results (BBC/Electoral Commission), Electoral Calculus MRP projections, Sir John Curtice predictions (Strathclyde University/BBC), Gorton and Denton results (Electoral Commission), Andy Burnham background (UK Parliament/Guardian/Times/Telegraph), Hannah Spencer interview (social media)