Sir Keir Starmer is not popular among voters, said Sir John Curtice (Image: GETTY)

       Sir Keir Starmer is not proving to be a vote-winner with the British public and is as unpopular as other Labour leaders who never made it to No 10, pollster Sir John Curtice has said.

       With his party enjoying a healthy lead in most opinion polls going into what is almost certain to be an election year, the former director of public prosecutions is widely tipped to be Britain’s next prime minister.

       But Sir John, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, believes Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives would be making a mistake by training their big guns on him.

       He told Express.co.uk: “We’re now being told that they are going to engage in personal attacks against Starmer. Well, if Keir Starmer was a really popular politician, it might be worthwhile, but he isn’t.

       “Apart from the fact that he's not Jeremy Corbyn, he's not attracting people to the Labour Party.”

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       Mr Sunak has problems of his own, Sir John stressed. “When Sunak became Prime Minister, he was less unpopular than his party, although he wasn't as popular as he had been before the revelations about his wife's non-dom status," he said.

       “But now basically, if you follow YouGov’s data and everybody else's data showing the same thing, he’s become less popular during the course of this year.

       “According to YouGov, he's now as unpopular as his party. So basically, in a sense, the crucial attribute that Sunak was meant to be able to deliver for his party, which is a modicum of popularity, that's gone.”

       However, Sir Keir was failing to capitalise, Sir John said. “We've got two unpopular leaders," he explained. "I went to a presentation of young researchers working in the polling industry.

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       Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Image: Getty)

       “And the guy hosted this lovely presentation, in which they basically said: ‘You know what, if you take past precedent, the Government is heading for defeat. But so, also, is the Opposition.’

       “And part of that was basically Starmer looks like an unpopular Leader of the Opposition, like previous leaders of the opposition who have never made it. But equally Sunak is an unpopular Prime Minister, like previous prime ministers who have been turfed out by the electorate.

       “And neither party frankly has a leader that is a particular positive, at least so far as public perceptions of this are concerned.”

       Labour has had several post-war leaders who never won a general election. Hugh Gaitskell, in the job from 1955 until his death in 1963, was defeated by Harold Macmillan in 1959, for example, while Neil Kinnock lost two general elections back to back, in 1987 and 1992.

       Neil Kinnock led Labour to two defeats, in 1987 and 1992 (Image: Getty)

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       A YouGov poll published on December 13 suggested that Mr Sunak had fallen to his worst ever favourability rating, -49, down 10 points compared with the previous month.

       However, the survey also made grim reading for Sir Keir, the MP for Holburn and St Pancras.

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       A YouGov spokesman said: “While Labour are doubtless revelling in the Government’s misfortune, neither they nor their leader are seeing any benefit to their own brands.

       “Keir Starmer’s net favourability rating has fallen nine points to -22 over the last fortnight, with the 32 percent of Britons holding a positive opinion of the Labour leader outweighed by the 54 percent with a negative one.

       YouGov’s survey was based on interviews with 2,001 British adults carried out on December 11 and 12.

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