The key moments of Labour's first 100 days in power at Westminster

Instead of the new administration riding high in a honeymoon period, Keir Starmer has watched his own approval ratings plummet to record lows, polling below even Rishi Sunak and Nigel Farage.

Pete Wishart, who has represented the SNP at Westminster since 2001, said he had never seen “such a calamitous decline in the polls in such a short period of time”.

“They've got four more years, as a minimum,” he went on. “That the whole experience of government is going to be defined by such a massive fall in popularity – it's going to be a long, hard slog for them.”

A timeline of Labour’s first 100 days in power:

Prime Minister Keir Starmer swept to power, and promptly warned that everything was set to get worseJuly 5: Keir Starmer’s Labour party wins a landslide in the General Election, returning 411 MPs out of the 650 seats at Westminster.

July 6: Labour scrap the Tories’ Rwanda deportations plan in their first big move in power. However, less than two weeks later Starmer will say that he is open to processing UK asylum claims offshore after all.

July 17: The King’s Speech sees Labour outline 40 new bills on their government agenda, including watered-down reforms of the House of Lords and more devolution in England.

July 23: A vote on the King’s Speech is overshadowed after Starmer suspends seven left-wing Labour MPs – including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell – for backing an SNP amendment aimed at scrapping the two-child benefit cap. “It’s Labour’s two-child cap now,” the SNP say.

July 25: Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband “launches” Great British Energy. Or at least, that’s what the UK Government says. The bill itself is just four pages long – and the location of its headquarters remains secret for now.

July 29: Chancellor Rachel Reeves scraps the universal Winter Fuel Payment in a defining moment for Labour’s first 100 days in government. The mantra of “no austerity under Labour” is undermined within one month of the party taking power.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves's Winter Fuel Payment cut has defined Labour's austerity agenda (Image: PA) July 30: Violent far-right riots kick off in England and Northern Ireland after murders in Southport and misinformation spread online. Reform UK MP Nigel Farage is accused of fanning the flames, but Starmer refuses to condemn him.

August 7: Fears of escalation of the race riots are quashed by grassroots action as anti-fascism and racism campaigners take to streets across the UK to combat the far-right. More than 100 far-right protests had been planned, but unrest largely failed to materialise.

August 21: Rumbles of cronyism come to a head after Labour hand party donor Ian Corfield a paid role in the Treasury. Fingers also point to Jess Sargeant, who previously worked for the key party think tank Labour Together, after she was given a civil service role in the Cabinet Office.

August 25: Corfield resigns from his paid position, but the media focus is now on Waheed Alli, a Labour peer who was handed a No 10 pass despite having no formal role. Alli, reported to be worth £200m, had donated clothes and glasses to the Starmers.

August 27: Starmer uses his first official keynote speech to warn that his government’s first Budget will be “painful”. “Things are worse than we ever imagined,” he says. In the following days, reports say that Reeves has asked key government departments such as health and education to find savings of more than £1 billion each. John Swinney goes on to accuse Labour of “delivering the same damaging austerity as the Tories”.

READ MORE: Keir Starmer making it 'difficult' to argue for Union, Better Together adviser says

September 2: The Labour government suspends some arms exports to Israel (30 out of 350 licences) amid fears they will be used to commit war crimes. However, exports of parts for F-35 jets, which have been used in Gaza, are explicitly allowed to continue.

September 19: Starmer is forced to insist he is “in control” of No 10 after bitter infighting among rival factions in Downing Street builds towards a climax. His chief of staff Sue Gray’s pay packet has already been leaked to the media – it was, it transpired, more than he is paid.

September 20: Starmer, Reeves, and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announce that they will no longer accept clothes as gifts in an attempt to draw a line under a growing scandal, for which Starmer had shown no regret or contrition. Just days earlier, he had insisted that accepting gifts was all within the rules and ending them would be “pushing it a bit far”.

September 21: Starmer’s popularity is found to have dropped by 45 points since the General Election in an Opinium poll for the Observer. He is now more unpopular than Rishi Sunak.

September 29: MP Rosie Duffield resigns from Labour, accusing Starmer’s leadership team of showing “off-the-scale” levels of "sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice".

Sue Gray did not last 100 days after the General Election as Keir Starmer's chief of staffOctober 6: Sue Gray resigns as Starmer’s chief of staff after weeks of negative briefings and infighting plunged the new No 10 administration into shambles. She is instead made an “envoy” to the nations and regions, sparking questions and criticism of a “colonial mindset”. Morgan McSweeney, a key Starmer adviser with a reputation likened to Dominic Cummings, is made chief of staff.

October 8: YouGov finds record disapproval ratings for Starmer, at 63% negative. He is now more unpopular than Nigel Farage.

October 10: Labour publish their workers’ rights bill, managing to meet a pre-election pledge to do so within 100 days of taking power. It is welcomed in some quarters, but criticised by others. Unite the Union says it has “more holes than Swiss cheese”, while The Economist reports that Labour have “fudged” it.

October 11: Starmer heads to Scotland to chair a new “council of nations and regions”. Gray, despite her new envoy role, sits it out. No representatives of Scottish cities are invited – although English ones are – leading to criticism from even Scottish Labour figures. More bad polling news for Labour follows, as Ipsos finds record low approval ratings for both Starmer and Reeves – and that the British public give Labour just 3.8/10 for how they’re running things.

Scottish Labour – who after a landslide victory in the July General Election were greedily eyeing up a 2026 Holyrood win – have been left touting achievements of the previous Tory government (such as tax cuts for independent films and protected status for Scotch whisky in Brazil) as they mark the 100-day milestone.

And Scottish Labour cannot divorce themselves from their London bosses on many key issues. The end of the universal Winter Fuel Payment, which has cut through with the public in a massive way, found one of its strongest proponents in Anas Sarwar, who labelled it an “opportunity” for Scotland.

However, Wishart said the public don’t see it that way. Instead, Labour’s prospects of further election victories have been “really diminished”, he argued.

“We had a by-election in Perth a few weeks ago and [Winter Fuel Payment] was a major issue that was coming up on the doorsteps,” the SNP MP said.

“People were genuinely annoyed and aggrieved about all of this, particularly in Scotland where we have a colder climate. There was a sense that we had been particularly singled out.”

READ MORE: Labour 'just slashing again which failed last time', warns top economist

So, where did Labour go so wrong? Amid infighting in No 10 and Starmer’s chief of staff Gray handing in her resignation, “cronyism” allegations and a focus on donors’ gifts, and a new wave of austerity, it could be hard to pin it on any one thing.

Wishart, who has seen more than one government come and go during his time at Westminster, said Starmer’s top team only had themselves to blame.

“I was elected in 2001 and … there was never any prospect that anything other than another massive Labour majority was going to be there,” he said. “Such was the popularity of the Labour government and such was the sense that things were definitely going to be getting better under Tony Blair at that point.

SNP MP Pete Wishart was first elected to Westminster in 2001 (Image: Jane Barlow) “The expectation was that things would improve with this new government. They would get down to the business of making life better for everybody across the United Kingdom. They decided not to do that – they've decided they want to demonstrate that they are as tough as the Tories when it comes to immigration, public spending and the delivery of welfare benefits. That’s been the downfall.

“The fact is that they raised the expectations of the ‘change’ party, and the public have seen nothing of change.”

Starmer has repeatedly insisted that there are no “quick fixes” and that repairing the UK’s crisis-hit public services and economy will take time. If he fails to deliver before 2029, it seems unlikely voters will give him a second chance. For a Scottish Labour hoping to win in 2026, the timeline is even tighter.