 It's been a bad week for Labour and Keir Starmer when it comes to election results and polls. In last week's local election, Labour lost 326 council seats while the Conservatives gained 235. Labour also lost a considerable number of seats to the Greens. You can see they added 88 councillors to the number they already had. Now the results were the worst showing for a leader of the opposition in their first round of local elections in over 40 years. So here you can see that in those elections, the ones that just happened, Labour lost 7% of their councillors. Now we've got the data from 1984 of the seats lost or gained by leaders of the opposition in the first local elections of their leadership and no one has done this badly. Jeremy Corbyn lost seats in the first election as his leader of the opposition which was historically quite poor. Keir Starmer much poorer, much worse. Ed Miliband increased Labour's councillors by 9% in his first set of council elections. As you can see, Tony Blair did quite well in 1995. So all of this show, that's when it comes to electoral performances. Labour under Keir Starmer is looking historically bad. But what about Keir Starmer himself? Now the argument you'll often hear from Labour's centrist is that Keir Starmer is actually fairly popular. Labour are just struggling because they have a tarnished brand. Unfortunately for Sir Keir, that claim is not born out in polling data. And in the wake of last week's council results, his personal ratings have continued to go south. How do we know this? You gov regularly ask voters the following question. Do you think Keir Starmer is doing well or badly as leader of the Labour Party? Now in their latest survey from the 10th of May, just 17% said he was doing well which is down 9 points since April the 12th. In that same survey 65% said he was doing badly which is up a huge 15 points from April 12th. That gives Starmer a net approval rating of minus 48 is worst ever with you gov. Minus 48, that's pretty bad. Now how does this compare with the historically unpopular, the unelectable, the disastrous Jeremy Corbyn? Well if we compare like with like, so that's their ratings at the same point in their leadership, it turns out that Starmer comes out worse. So this is the ratings that Corbyn had in September 2016. Again not very good. 21% of people thought he was doing well, 61% of people thought he was doing badly. Not good. Those are bad ratings. They needed improving. Keir Starmer though, it's worse. So only 17% of people think he's doing well at his job. 65% think he's doing badly. So this is the man who was elected to be leader of the Labour Party precisely because he would be better at the media. He'd be better at communicating to the public. He'd be more confident, competent and popular. And it turns out he's doing worse than Corbyn. And when it comes to public opinion, obviously Corbyn had some achievements to put to his name even when he was quite unpopular. He brought new ideas back into the mainstream. What has Keir Starmer achieved other than people not really liking him? Now Ash, I want to bring you in on this because on one level I'm quite impressed with Keir Starmer. And that's because I seriously didn't believe you could end up with ratings quite this bad without a systematic smear campaign against you. Keir Starmer has done this all of his own accord. He didn't have any help in becoming this unpopular. It was just him. Do you know what? I think all of us were guilty of vastly overestimating Keir Starmer's competence because it was a creature of pure aesthetics. He was a man who came along said, I am competent. And we all went, yeah, that sounds like the kind of thing a competent person would say. It was something that was reinforced of course by his main cheerleaders, his team and lobby journalists. Everybody absolutely raced to fall over themselves calling him forensic and you know, just this image of professionalism and electability. And then the problem is that he turned out to be not particularly electable because people won't vote for him and not particularly professional because he keeps doing things badly. And so when that's your offer to people, and it's not really based on values, it's not really based on an attractive political culture. And it's certainly not based on a policy vision about how you're going to improve this country. Once those things melt away, what are you left with? You're left with somebody who looks a bit techy, who comes across like a deputy head teacher who's just lost control of the school assembly. And what's more, everybody can see it. And that's the problem I think of having a labour leadership which goes, we can win things is when you don't. And when you don't, because I think there is this historic material realignment in English politics, and you don't have anything to speak to those chasms in terms of home ownership and values and concentrations of young voters. Then you just look like a stuffed suit, you've got nothing for you. So in a way, yeah, I'm impressed by how fast it's fallen apart for him. I don't think that there's been any other Labour leader who has fallen so far not only in the public estimation so quickly, but has also hemorrhaged the support that he was able to count on amongst Britain's commentary. And the sad thing for him is that he doesn't have this lively, passionate grassroots movement to back him up, because he spent the last year of his leadership going, I'm embarrassed of you. You're too woke, you're too urban. And those of you who voted for my predecessor are probably all anti-Semites. Now that means that you don't have this really vibrant movement to ride into the rescue and do all the stuff that you can't achieve through media interventions anymore. So what's he done? He's alienated his left flank traipsing right after a bunch of votes who aren't ever going to come back and taking advice from Labour right-wingers who the minute it's convenient to them are going to throw him out a window. That's hardly forensic now, is it? It's hardly forensic. I have to say, I am just really, you know, Corbyn by September 2016, he'd be completely dragged through the mud, you know, terrorist supervisor, anti-Semite, hates Britain, all of these things have been printed about Jeremy Corbyn to create a level of hostility among the public towards him, right? And obviously also the first months of Corbyn were a mess. His team was a mess. They didn't know what they were doing, right? So for Starmer to be doing even worse than that, when, and you know, we've talked about why the Corbyn campaign originally was a bit of a mess is because he never expected to be in power. He was constantly subjected to attempts to overthrow him. Keir Starmer has had lots of things in his favour, right? He had a big team of people who had done this before, you know, Peter Mandelson who's brought in, he knows how to lead a party, terrible politics, but he knows what he's doing. They're not completely new to all of this. And the press have gone really, really lightly on them, and they're doing even worse than Jeremy Corbyn. If someone had said that in the leadership election, you'd get called like a deluded ultra leftist to say, to guess, to assume that Keir Starmer would be less popular than Jeremy Corbyn. I think people would say, what the hell are you talking about? You could say, you know, his politics aren't as exciting, but he's clearly going to be more popular than Jeremy Corbyn. At the same point in their leadership. No, it wasn't just this poll by YouGov Eva. The first poll to be released after local elections was by Redfield and Winton Strategies. They say Keir Starmer's net approval rating stands at minus 7%, a six point decrease from last week and the lowest ever net approval rating for Starmer since he became leader of the Labour Party. In that same poll, we can see the effect the local elections and the fallout from them had on voting intention. So this is the latest from Redfield, Winton, the Conservatives are up five on 45%. Labour are down four on 34%. This often happens after elections. People think, are the Conservatives a winners? Maybe we should vote for them, the Labour Party, their losers? Why would we vote for them? You remember, you know, after the 2017 general election, that's when Labour's polling was super, super high, because people are actually this party serious, other people like them will pile in. I wonder if you'll be able to come back from these terrible ratings for a little bit more of a granular sense of what people think about Keir Starmer, especially when compared to Boris Johnson, we can go to more details from Redfield and Winton. So they asked voters or respondents, who do you think best embodies the following characteristics and they included stands up for the interests of the United Kingdom, can build a strong economy is a strong leader, can work with foreign leaders, understands the problems affecting the UK represents change, has better foreign policy strategy tells the truth, and cares about people like me. So there's lots of these. And you can see them all up on the screen. There's only one in which Keir Starmer comes out ahead of Boris Johnson. And that's that he is in better good physical and mental health than Boris Johnson, according to the public. And you got to remember, a year ago, Boris Johnson was taken into an intensive care unit with Coronavirus. So to be in better physical and mental health than Boris Johnson isn't particularly hard. It's also not much of a political achievement is it to be in better health than your opponent. Ask your final thoughts on this particular topic. Is there any way Keir can make a comeback? Political turnarounds work when a politician is able to say, I wasn't being myself before, but now I am here is my real self. Now the problem with Keir Starmer is that really, since the time he's become an MP, he hasn't really had a real self that you get a sense of or that you think he's abandoned. So if you're trying to go, and this is the real authentic me and all manifest in these values and these policies and this way of relating to the world around me. I don't think it works. And I think the problem is is that he jettisoned having his own analysis of how the world works and what the Labour Party should do in favour of these completely empty aesthetic signifiers of electability and professionalism. And now those two things in tatters, I think he's got nothing left. So he might completely surprise me. He might reach down deep and find a real authentic self that was lurking there the whole time, all these policies that he really believes in and a cultural frame which holds it all together. But I just don't think he's got it in him.