Over the next five weeks the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the leader of the opposition, Labour’s Keir Starmer, will be battling to persuade voters that they are the best person to helm the next government.
Sunak’s election announcement last week surprised many political commentators because his Conservative party is trailing Labour in the opinion polls by more than 20 percentage points.
Despite the starkly different polling for their respective parties, both leaders share something in common: low personal popularity with voters. A YouGov poll for Sky News this week found 68% thought Sunak had been a “bad prime minister” since he took office in 2022, while 47% said they thought Starmer would be a bad one if he wins.
How do the two men’s backgrounds and political outlooks compare? In some regards, they are starkly different.
Sunak, 44, was born in Southampton to middle-class parents of Punjabi Indian descent and is the first person of colour and first practising Hindu to be prime minister. But in many respects his background is firmly in the establishment. A former investment banker and hedge fund manager, he was educated at the fee-paying school Winchester college, then Oxford University followed by Stanford University in California.
Starmer, 61, grew up in Oxted, Surrey, and comes from a working-class family: his father was a toolmaker and his mother was a nurse. He studied at Leeds University and Oxford. He did not enter parliament until he was in his 50s, after a career as a high-flying human rights lawyer and then director of public prosecutions.
Both men are married with two children. Starmer’s wife, Victoria, is a former solicitor who now works for the National Health Service. Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of the Indian billionaire owner of Infosys, NR Narayana Murthy. The couple have a combined wealth of £651m, making them richer than King Charles. This has repeatedly come under scrutiny during a cost of living crisis. Sunak has faced criticism for using private jets and a Peloton exercise bike, as well as for wearing Prada shoes and a £750 backpack.
Both men have sought to distance themselves from their political predecessors, and their relationships with elements of their respective parties has sometimes been fraught. Sunak came to prominence as chancellor when Boris Johnson was prime minister. During the pandemic he spent huge sums on a furlough scheme to protect people’s jobs and wages. He also launched the controversial “eat out to help out” scheme to encourage people to go out to restaurants, which was subsequently blamed for increasing the spread of Covid.
Sunak’s resignation as chancellor helped to push Johnson out of office. He lost to Liz Truss in the subsequent Conservative leadership election but was ushered into office by Tory MPs after Truss’s shock tax cuts pushed the UK to the brink of recession. He has faced repeated attack from opponents on the Tory right, most notably the former home secretary (interior minister) Suella Braverman, whom he sacked last year. She has accused him of failing on his pledge to reduce immigration, particularly stopping small boat crossings via the Channel.
Sunak’s attempts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has been dismissed as an expensive gimmick. He has admitted that none will be flown to the east African country before the election. He has also failed to make progress on other key pledges he made when he came into office: for example the overall number of patients waiting for treatment on the NHS is now higher.
Starmer, since becoming the party leader in 2020, has gained a reputation as a ruthless moderniser for his determination to steer Labour back to power after 14 years in opposition. He recently told the Guardian: “I hate losing. Some say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp.”
While in his younger days he edited a radical Trotskyist magazine called Socialist Alternatives, Starmer has sought to distance the party from its former leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom he served under as shadow Brexit secretary. Starmer banned his predecessor from standing for Labour after Corbyn said the scale of antisemitism in the party was “dramatically overstated”.
Several people from Starmer’s inner circle have recently been installed as parliamentary candidates in safe Labour seats, while prominent sitting leftwing Labour MPs have been blocked from standing for the party in the general election.
Both Sunak and Starmer have put pledges of economic stability at the heart of their election campaigns. Sunak has cited a recent fall in the rate of inflation as a sign that his economic plan is working.
Starmer, who insists he is a socialist and a progressive, also maintains that economic growth will turn around the UK’s fortunes. He says a change of government is needed to “stop the chaos” of Tory rule. But he has also dropped some of his former pledges, including abolishing university tuition fees and nationalising energy and water companies, arguing they cannot be fulfilled owing to the state of the country’s finances.
In contrast to Sunak, Starmer opposed Brexit during the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. But since becoming Labour leader he has ruled out a second referendum, after criticism that his previous support for this was a major factor in Corbyn’s defeat in the 2019 general election.
As both men fight for the political middle ground, where the path to electoral victory is believed to lie, they must hope there remains sufficient distinction between their policies to win over undecided voters.
