Voters have given a damning assessment of the British opposition leader — a day before his Labour Party's annual conference kicks off.
A poll by Opinium Research for Sky News showed that while a majority of Britons believe Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is "competent", more than twice as many think he is "weak" and "boring" as did the opposite.
Only a third said Starmer was "in touch with people's concerns", compared to 43 percent who thought he was not. On whether the Labour Party had improved since he became leader in April 2020, 30 percent said yes, 21 percent said it had got worse, while 37 percent said it was "about the same".
Overall, support for Starmer was strongest in the capital London — far from the northern "Red Wall" seats Labour lost to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservatives at the 2019 general election.
One consolation for Starmer was that a majority of 52 percent supported his continued suspension of the party whip from his left-wing predecessor as leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Just under half of voters surveyed — 46 percent — backed Labour forming a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party in the case of a hung Parliament after the next election. That compared to just 28 percent who supported a deal with the separatist Scottish National Party, which holds four times as many seats as the Lib Dems, 24 percent for Northern Ireland's traditionally Conservative-allied Democratic Unionist Party, and only 13 percent for the Irish republican Sinn Fein.
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In another embarrassment for the Labour leader, a vox pop survey of residents in the County Durham town of Consett found they were less than impressed with his performance. Starmer responded with an anecdote about chatting with taxi drivers in nearby Darlington.
Meanwhile another survey by pollsters YouGov found that, after briefly taking the lead earlier this month, Labour had bled three percentage points of support to the Liberal Democrats and Greens, leaving the Tories with a seven-point advantage.
And poll aggregator Britain Elects illustrated the shocking fact that the Tories are now more popular in Scotland than Labour, which won nearly every seat north of the border in the 1997 and 2001 general elections.