Starmer's favorability bounces after surviving leadership threat

Ellen Milligan, Bloomberg News on Feb 12, 2026

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Keir Starmer’s net favorability rating picked up in the aftermath of his leadership crisis this week, logging its highest reading since August, YouGov said.

The data shows the British public still holds a negative view of the prime minister, with just 22% saying they held a favorable view of Starmer, against 69% who see him unfavorably. That gave him a net rating of minus 47, compared with minus 23 for main opposition Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch and minus 37 for Nigel Farage, whose Reform U.K. Party leads national polling.

YouGov conducted its fieldwork on Tuesday and Wednesday, after a dramatic two days which saw Starmer’s grip on the premiership severely tested amid the departures of two key aides and a challenge from his Labour Party’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, for the premier also to quit. Starmer emerged fighting from that, securing the endorsements of every member of his Cabinet — including potential leadership rivals — before delivering a well-received speech to his backbench MPs.

“There maybe some base-rallying in there that’s causing it,” Luke Tryl, of pollster More in Common said of the YouGov reading. At the same time, Tryl cautioned that his own organization’s polling, conducted at a similar time, had seen a drop in Starmer’s approval rating.

Starmer faces more challenges in coming weeks, including the enforced disclosure of the vetting papers surrounding Mandelson, as well as emails between the former envoy and government ministers and aides in both the run-up to his appointment and during his 7-month tenure. Starmer sacked his envoy in September after a Bloomberg News investigation revealed the Labour grandee had maintained closer with the late convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein than had previously been known.

The requirement to publish documents relating to Mandelson came about after the Tories last week proposed a binding motion requesting the transparency, that the government acceded to, under pressure from its own backbenchers.

On Thursday, Cabinet Office Minister Chris Ward told the House of Commons that the government “hopes” to publish its first tranche of Mandelson documents after the recess, which begins later in the day and runs through to Feb. 23. He said the wide scope of the Tory motion meant there was a lot of material for officials to parse, and that the government was also working with the police to ensure the disclosures don’t prejudice a criminal investigation into Mandelson’s activities.

“We will comply fully and deliver this as quickly and transparently as possible,” Ward said.

The prime minister this week has come under further pressure over his appointment of another official with links to a pedophile to the House of Lords. Starmer went ahead with the nomination to the upper chamber of his former communications chief Matthew Doyle in recent weeks despite a Sunday Times story that Doyle had campaigned for a man charged with child sex offenses. Starmer this week booted Doyle out of the Parliamentary Labour Party, telling the House of Commons on Wednesday that Doyle “did not give a full account of his actions.”

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—With assistance from Joe Mayes and Alex Morales.