Sir Keir Starmer’s “weak” political antennae are making him more unpopular, Britain’s leading polling guru has said.

Prof Sir John Curtice compared the Prime Minister with Rishi Sunak on the strength of his first three months in Downing Street.

In an interview with Times Radio, Sir John noted that Sir Keir was “never a popular politician” and his weaknesses had also been evident during his time as leader of the opposition.

Sir John said: “He got a bit of a boost having won the election, his ratings went up, surprise, surprise, but they’ve gone down pretty quickly.”

Sir Keir has endured a shaky start to his time in power, following a widespread backlash to his decision to strip about 10 million pensioners of winter fuel payments.

Last week’s Labour Party conference was also overshadowed by an ongoing row over thousands of pounds in clothes given to Sir Keir by the Labour peer and millionaire donor Lord Alli.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Lord Alli, but the scale of his donations has prompted criticism and led Rosie Duffield, the MP for Canterbury, to resign the Labour whip.

Sir John added: “What are the problems? I would pick out two. One is that he is not very good at setting a narrative – frankly, he shares that weakness with Rishi Sunak. And the question is whether any of the four [Tory] candidates for this party can come with a narrative.

“The second is that his political antennae are weak. He’s not very good at spotting problems before they hit him. We saw that when he admitted Natalie Elphicke to the parliamentary Labour Party, the former Conservative MP for Dover and Deal.

“And immediately the question that was always going to be asked was ‘What about Diane Abbott?’ and it took them a long time to realise they needed to deal with Diane Abbott’s suspension.”

Ms Abbott spent more than a year as an independent MP after her suspension for claiming that Jewish people did not experience racism “all their lives”, comments for which she later apologised.

There was a backlash on the Labour Left to the decision to admit Ms Elphicke, who did not seek re-election, and it triggered fresh questions about when Ms Abbott might be reinstated.

The MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington claimed she had been barred from standing for the party when the election was called, although was eventually allowed to run on a Labour ticket.

Sir John also suggested that Labour would struggle with the rise of smaller parties, which was evidenced by support for the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK at the election in July.

He said: “The Labour Party has hit some rough water. Some of us take the view that all that’s happened is the weaknesses in Labour’s politics and strategy that were evident before the election have just simply become more clearly exposed by being in government.

“One of my abiding memories of the election campaign, remember that seven-way election debate – you had Nigel Farage and John Swinney and others in between. You had Penny Mordaunt and Angela Rayner, honourable though they are, talking to each other, and ignored everybody else.

The first thing about the 2024 election is that the big parties could no longer assume that the contest is simply between them… All parties now are going to have realise that 2024 may be the election in which the two-party system effectively died a death.

Sir John added that the Prime Minister had been a victim of his own promises to clean up politics when the donations row hit the headlines over the summer.

He said: “Particularly, [Sir Keir seems to have] made the mistake so many politicians make, which is you win an election and say we’re going to improve trust, to keep to the rules, we’re going to be more honest than the previous lot,” he said.

“That is almost always setting you up for a fall and that is what we have seen. Not because Labour have broken the rules, but because it’s cut across people’s sense of ethics given some of the other decisions they have made.”

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