Power Without Popularity: Starmer Won With Fewer Votes Than Corbyn as the Tories Collapsed
A seat landslide built on lower turnout, fewer Labour votes, and a historic Conservative collapse.
Downing Street is in turmoil. Senior staff have resigned, the communications operation looks rattled, and ministers are out daily insisting that Keir Starmer has a “clear mandate from the British people.”
That claim deserves scrutiny, because when you look at the election data, the story Westminster keeps telling itself doesn’t hold up.
This was a landslide of seats, yes. But it was not a landslide of support.
🗳️ A tale of two elections
Start with the most uncomfortable fact. In 2019, under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour won 10.27 million votes. In 2024, under Starmer, Labour won 9.71 million votes. That’s around 560,000 fewer votes.
And yet Corbyn was routed, while Starmer walked into No.10 with a commanding Commons majority.
Among people who actually voted, Labour was more popular in 2019 than in 2024.
If elections were decided on raw voter support alone, Corbyn, not Starmer, would be remembered as having the stronger claim to public backing.
👥 A bigger electorate… and millions who stayed home
The paradox deepens when you look at turnout.
The electorate was larger in 2024 than in 2019. More people were eligible to vote.
But far fewer bothered.
2019 turnout: 67.3%
2024 turnout: 59.7%
In absolute terms:
32.0 million votes were cast in 2019
28.8 million votes were cast in 2024
That’s around 3.2 million fewer voters, despite population growth.
So when ministers talk about a sweeping mandate from “the people”, the reality is one of millions of people disengaged entirely, and Labour still attracted fewer voters than five years earlier.
📉 So how did Starmer win?
Not because Labour surged. Because the Conservatives collapsed.
Between 2019 and 2024, the Conservative vote fell from 13.97 million to 6.83 million, a loss of over 7 million votes.
Labour didn’t need to grow. It simply needed to hold together while its main rival disintegrated.
That’s why Labour’s vote share rose even as its vote total fell: the overall pool shrank, and the Conservative share imploded.
This wasn’t an endorsement of Labour’s agenda. It was a rejection of the Conservative Party.
🔀 Where did those votes go?
They didn’t flow neatly to Labour. They fragmented.
🟦 Reform UK took 4.12 million votes, more than six times the Brexit Party’s total in 2019. Back then, the Brexit Party stood candidates down in dozens of seats to help Boris Johnson secure a parliamentary majority to deliver Brexit. Reform did no such thing in 2024. Under First Past the Post, that mattered enormously.
🟩 The Greens surged, gaining over a million extra votes compared with 2019. That’s a clear signal that many voters who once backed Corbyn-style politics did not transfer their loyalty to Starmer; they went elsewhere.
🟠 The Liberal Democrats dramatically increased their seat count, but their vote total barely moved. Their success came from geographic efficiency and Conservative collapse, not from a national wave of enthusiasm.
Fragmentation, not mobilisation, decided the election.
📜 The mandate problem
Despite all this, Labour now governs as if it received an unambiguous endorsement for sweeping change. It didn’t.
Yes, Labour won the election. But it did not win a blank cheque.
Yet in office, the government has pushed or attempted policies that were not clearly or explicitly endorsed at the ballot box, including:
digital ID frameworks with real enforcement implications
scrapping the Winter Fuel Allowance, hitting pensioners
public order and stewarding trials that cut against civil liberties rhetoric
And repeatedly, these moves have triggered backlash, confusion, or quiet retreat.
U-turns aren’t just policy errors. They’re a sign that a government misjudged the consent it actually has.
💷 The economy and the credibility gap
The same pattern shows up in economic policy.
Voters were told that taxes on working people would not rise. In practice, the government has pushed measures that raise the cost of employment, squeeze take-home pay, and make hiring more expensive, at a time when payroll jobs are already under pressure.
That damages confidence. Businesses pause. Hiring slows. Jobs are lost. This isn’t ideology, it’s basic economics.
And when trust breaks early, the effects compound.
⚠️ Why the chaos matters
This is why the current upheaval in Downing Street matters.
A government that wins power on a fragile vote foundation tends to over-centralise, obsess over message control, and panic when the narrative slips, because it knows the authority suggested by its seat count isn’t fully matched by public consent.
A big majority can hide a thin mandate. Thin mandates produce brittle governments.
⏳ A premiership on borrowed time
No one masterminded a great popular realignment. What happened was much simpler.
The Conservative Party drove into a ditch. Labour, moving cautiously, kept rolling forward.
First Past the Post did the rest. Starmer didn’t win because the country rallied behind him. He won because fewer people voted, the Conservative coalition collapsed, Reform split the right, the Greens peeled voters from Labour’s left, and opposition votes piled up in the wrong places.
For now, Keir Starmer survives, protected by a large Commons majority that flatters his true level of public support. But the polling tells a more uncomfortable story: trust is weak, enthusiasm is thin, and voter drift is already underway.
That makes 7 May a defining moment. The local elections in England, alongside parliamentary elections in Wales and Scotland, will be the first real electoral test of Starmer’s authority since entering No.10. If Labour performs badly — or loses ground to Reform, the Greens, or a recovering opposition, it will confirm what the 2024 data already suggested: this premiership rests on fragile foundations. And should Starmer still be in office by then, those results may decide whether his leadership looks merely wounded — or fundamentally untenable.
✍️ Jamie Jenkins
Stats Jamie | Stats, Facts & Opinions
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Spot on as usual Jamie , the figures don't lie whereas politicians do !
First past the post is a bad system where there are no actual rules. It would work fine if the candidate was obliged to get at least 51% of the vote and at least 51% of the electorate voted. But, with the except of the Brexit referendum, my vote has never counted because I live in "safe seats". My MPs can be elected on 20% of a 20% turnout and call it a huge success. When was the last government which was full of MPs who got a majority of the votes from the majority of their constituents? (However, proportional representation leads to weak coalitions with continuous horse-trading like a variation on a bad marriage where everyone knows what they want to do but end up doing something no one wants to do as a compromise!)