It might be that Keir Starmer, not known for his rhetorical skills, expresses himself most clearly through his furrowed brow. It has a way of telling the public that none of this is easy and that difficult decisions must be made. It says that although Starmer wishes it were otherwise, things will get worse before they get better, if they do indeed get better; that there are no good options, only difficult decisions. The local and regional elections on Friday meted out another round of pain for Starmer, and his furrowed brow was once again doing a lot of the talking. “The results are tough, they are very tough,” he said. “That hurts, and it should hurt, and I take responsibility.”

Starmer’s furrowed brow courts pity and patience – but voters are in no mood to feel sorry for their prime minister. Instead, if the public’s feelings towards Starmer could be reduced to a single emotion, it would probably be hatred, resentment or scorn. Even those who don’t like Starmer can be surprised at the sheer intensity and spread of the animosity towards him. “[It] is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced,” John McDonnell said on LBC recently. On Newsnight on Wednesday, the Daily Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey said that “visceral dislike” of Starmer was the local elections’ defining theme – and the Labour peer Thangam Debbonaire conceded that “I’ve certainly picked that up on the doorstep, yes.”

It’s not that Starmer is viscerally hated by some people – that can be said of other prime ministers like Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson – but that he seems to be viscerally hated across the board. Once, the spited Corbyn wing of the Labour party – victim of Starmer’s anti-left purges – was alone in its anger. Now you would be hard-pressed to say which constituency hates Starmer the most. For a prime minister who seems desperate to appear inoffensive above all else, it is quite the achievement.

But the intensity and universality of the anti-Starmer rancour is not only Starmer’s doing. Yes, it tells us something about the man himself; but it also reveals something about our political moment and why his strategy has been so ill-suited to it.

Since the advent of social media, hate has become a remarkably powerful currency, culturally and politically, with the internet enabling any emotional attachment – positive or negative – to ground a community. The early 2000s saw the rise of many “anti-fan” blogs – the term was coined in 2003 – based around a shared hatred of a particular celebrity or show. Then came terms like “hate-watching”, “hate-sharing” and “hate-reading”, all of which reflected the engagement potential of performative dislike on social media. Hate, it turned out, could be just as effective – if not more effective – at pulling people in as love or devotion. Particularly after the financial crisis of 2007, and the disillusionment and anger it unleashed towards financial and political elites, these dynamics seeped into politics with a growing intensity.

There are, of course, plenty of reasons to dislike Starmer. His campaign for the Labour leadership – which channelled, in his words, “the moral case for socialism” – was fraudulent. His promises to clean up politics were clearly hollow. The cost of living continues to rise. His proud (if partial) opposition to Trump’s war with Iran only crystallises his total moral abdication on Gaza. His repeated U-turns reveal a man without convictions. Indeed, by now, Starmer has caved to criticism so many times that expressing animosity towards him is almost incentivised: either it makes him change his approach or it doesn’t, which justifies the hatred twice over. In neither scenario does his reputation improve, because any adjustment to his approach is taken as proof of his weakness rather than a shared politics. Even when Starmer does what you want, in other words, you still somehow resent him for it.

But scroll through social media and the same visceral loathing that Starmer faces can be seen across countless other contexts: whether it’s politics, pop culture or football commentary. Recently, a hate-fuelled rant from a Chelsea-supporting YouTube streamer (about one of his team’s own players) went viral. I don’t support Chelsea, and I’d never seen the streamer, Rory Jennings, before – but the intensity and rhetorical creativity of the rant was enough for it to be clipped across social media platforms, generating over a million views and landing in my feed. “When I tell you how much I hate this person,” he says, red in the face, “I’m not even factoring in how bad he is at football.” Jennings riffs, theatrically and at length, about the extent of his hatred, his commitment to nurturing it – and even his imagined rebuff to his mother when she tells him hating is a waste of time. He was talking about the winger Alejandro Garnacho. My mind wandered to Starmer. One can find eerily similar rants – from the right and the left – about him, too.

This context does not exonerate Starmer, but it does illuminate the nature of his failure. In an era of social media and extreme inequalities, every political leader is likely to be hated more intensely, which makes it imperative that they cultivate a base of supporters to fight their corner. This is Starmer’s gravest and most costly error: he never showed any interest in convincing a particular set of the electorate that he was on their side. The result is that the animosity towards him flows and grows through society almost entirely unopposed. His mistake was based on the complacent assumption that he could rise above the fray of partisan politics. Now he risks being swept away without trace by a nationwide hate-wave.

It is too late for Starmer to learn from his mistakes: he is in a hate-loop from which he cannot escape. Staying on this course ensures his enduring unpopularity, while any shift in approach will be viewed cynically. But whoever succeeds Starmer must at least see contemporary politics for what it is – partisan, emotive and combative – and act accordingly. The aim of progressive politics is not to avoid stirring negative or visceral emotions – that goes with the terrain – but to forge a movement that is strong and energetic enough to survive an opponent’s scorn and bring new people into its ranks.

• Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party

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