Did Starmer leave the country a better place than he found it?

There was no landslide against Starmer, but there was no benefit of the doubt either, and that split-the-difference quality is itself the story: a chamber that could not agree he had done harm on the scale of his predecessors nonetheless declined to call his brief spell in office a success. Given barely two years and an inheritance of stagnant growth and creaking services, this reads less as a verdict on failure than on insufficient time to prove otherwise.

The generational pattern cuts against the usual script. It was the 25-to-34s, not the young or the old, who were the one age group to back Starmer clearly, while every other bracket from 45 upward turned firmly against him — a coalition that looks less like youthful optimism than like the professional cohort most likely to have felt any stabilisation in their own prospects. Women here were markedly harsher than men, three to one against, suggesting the squeeze on household finances and the strain on services registered more sharply where the daily burden of both tends to fall.

The result sits atop a familiar British argument about what a "better" country even means after a period of austerity and drift — whether stabilising the numbers counts for anything if living standards keep sliding, a tension that has run from Cameron's cuts through Truss's mini-budget to this one. Voters here plainly leaned toward living standards as the truer measure.

That argument played out almost verbatim in the chamber's own top submissions. The floor's top Yes case pointed to hard indicators — "from getting NHS waiting lists to immigration figures, things are moving in the right direction" — while the most-respected No voice countered flatly that "by all important metrics we've taken a step backwards."

Two years, one dashed inheritance, and a country that voted, on balance, that the patient was not yet cured.