On 20 july 2026, Labour’s Andrew Burnham became Britain’s sixth prime minister in ten years, following Cameron’s resignation after losing the Brexit referendum in 2016. By contrast, the previous six—Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron—had collectively governed for a good forty years. Defenders of the Westminster parliamentary model—elections on a first-past-the-post, single-member constituency basis, managed since the First World War by the Conservative–Labour duopoly—have traditionally claimed that, however unrepresentative its results compared to more proportional continental forms, it had the great advantage of stability. Unlike the intemperate Latins or autocracy-inclined Teutons and Slavs, the Great British public could at least count on experienced rulers prepared to stay the course, keeping a steady prime-ministerial hand on the tiller through the turbulence of world political and economic affairs. Something had clearly gone awry.
Moreover, the high turnover of leaders suggests that a restless dissatisfaction—or timorous insecurity—has infected the two-party system itself. Only one of the past six prime ministers entered Number Ten through the traditional route—that is, by winning a general election. Instead, after Cameron resigned, Theresa May was chosen to fill his shoes in September 2016 by Tory Party members, from a shortlist of two selected by Conservative mps. When she bowed out, broken by her backbenchers’ intransigence during the Brexit negotiations, Tory members chose Boris Johnson by the same process in July 2019. When he fell foul of Whitehall chiefs, the media, the opinion polls and his own mps after partying during Covid, Liz Truss was picked by the same method in September 2022; as was Rishi Sunak in October 2022, when Truss resigned after a rebellion by bond markets and, once again, Tory mps.
Starmer promised to break this pattern. He entered office in July 2024 on the back of a general-election landslide, Labour winning 411 of the House of Commons’ 650 seats, promising ‘change’—he would restore stability by way of level-headed competence. As proof of concept he could point to the harsh discipline that he and his Labour Together team, under chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, had already meted out to purge their party of Corbynistas and supporters of Palestinian rights.footnote1 Yet within a year, this supposedly exemplary government had plunged to 23 per cent in the polls and was facing a backbench rebellion. U-turns and apologies followed, amid damaging scandals. By May 2026 Labour was down to 17 per cent, tied with the Tories and Greens, while Reform took 26 per cent in the local elections. Tendering his resignation on 22 June, Starmer became the shortest-lived Labour prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. It’s worth examining the reasons for his decline and fall—political, social, ideological and economic—for the light they can shed on the systemic problems afflicting British politics, and on Burnham’s chances of avoiding a similar fate.
Starmer’s resignation speech, delivered on 22 June in his customary drone from outside Number Ten, largely consisted in the boiler-plate list of self-congratulations expected of any politician. But the outgoing Prime Minister put surprising emphasis on his role in wrenching Labour back to the right:
I was told time and time again that my party was finished, that we were consigned to history, that a majority at the general election, let alone a landslide majority, was impossible. But we proved those people wrong because we changed our party, ripping out the poison of anti-semitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence and national security . . .footnote2
By ‘ripping out the poison’ he meant expelling hundreds of Labour Party members, many of them Jews, for criticizing Israel. He sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet for re-tweeting a post critical of the Israeli secret services. The zenith was the suspension of the anti-Zionist Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, the only Jew elected to Labour’s National Executive Committee. Expulsions were not needed for the 200,000-plus members who left the Party of their own accord under Starmer (325,000 having joined when Corbyn was in charge).footnote3
Starmer’s farewell went on to claim that he left a stronger economy, growing faster than its peers—in fact, lagging Ireland and Spain, with an average growth rate of 0.3 per cent per quarter while he’d been in charge, with regional inequality all the more deeply entrenched—and ‘half a million children being lifted out of poverty’. This echoed a claim made by Blair’s defenders, for he too, apparently, had ‘lifted’ the same number; perhaps the Tories had put them back.footnote4 Yet if half a million are moving in and out of poverty with every new government, it sounds more like a statistical tweak than a true structural reform, which would rule out a return to the past. But for that a plan is needed, and a strategy for implementing it; something Starmer never had. The ten cloudy ‘pledges’ on which he ran as Labour leader in 2020—‘Put the Green New Deal at the heart of everything we do’, ‘No more illegal wars’, ‘An immigration system based on compassion and dignity’—crafted by his team to ensure enough support from Labour members to get their candidate into office, were binned soon after on the grounds that the situation had changed.footnote5