If the Labour Party won the United Kingdom’s July 2024 general election, promised Keir Starmer in June, it would “relight the fire” of optimism in Britain. Well, it went out. According to one recent poll, three-quarters of Britons think that the country is going in the wrong direction. According to another, 62 percent disapprove of the job the government is doing. Six months after Tony Blair had won a similarly lopsided parliamentary majority, in 1997, one poll found that 52 percent were satisfied with his government and 70 percent with Blair himself.