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Yesterday, in a development predictable enough that even Donald Trump saw it coming, British PM Keir Starmer announced that he will resign his post. If newly-minted MP Andy Burnham is the only candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party, then Starmer will leave office on July 16. If there is an actual leadership contest, the PM will stay on until September. Either way, his tenure will end up being a little more than 2 years—longer than a head of lettuce lasts, but not great. Meanwhile, the U.K. will move on to its seventh PM in just over 10 years (David Cameron, the first of those seven, left office on July 13, 2016).
Reader R.O. in Manchester, England, UK has sent us a breakdown of how it went so wrong for Starmer:
Keir Starmer finally bowed to the inevitable on Monday morning and announced that he was stepping down as Prime Minister, scheduling the start of the leadership contest for the 9th of July. The fact that this means he can attend the NATO conference on the 7th (the one part of his job he actually seems to both enjoy and is good at) is surely a complete coincidence.
Ultimately, Starmer's tenure is likely to be remembered as a staggering failure of party management. He has a huge majority in the House of Commons, and no need to go back to the electorate until 2029. The only people who can remove him at the moment are the 400-odd Labour MPs, and so all he really had to do was ensure that they remained happy enough with his leadership not to usurp him. This is not overly challenging, as any coup requires 20% of sitting MPs—around 81—to back it, and would then need to defeat him with the Labour membership, who are generally very loyal to their leaders. But Starmer has antagonized these two groups more than any leader since 1931, when Ramsey MacDonald literally left the party to govern with the Conservatives during the Great Depression.
For many years, the British Labour party has broadly consisted of three wings—referred to as the right, the soft-left and the hard-left—and the major challenge of any Labour leader is in keeping all three wings united. The right is the smallest group, but promotes itself as "the grown-ups in the room" and are probably most closely analogous to the U.S. Democrats; the hard-left is also quite small but favors Scandinavian-style social democratic policies; while the bulk of the party are in the soft-left, who sit on a spectrum between the other two factions. Every leader emerges from one wing, but the art of balancing the interests of all three is the difference between a party that can govern effectively, and one which collapses into an embarrassing public civil war. Even the extremely right Tony Blair understood that you wanted hard-left Jeremy Corbyn inside the party, even if he voted against it 50% of the time, rather than outside voting against it 100% of the time.
Starmer has utterly failed in this task. From the start, his leadership was dedicated to a strategy generally referred to as "punch left"—banish the hard-left of the party and marginalize the soft-left, while empowering the right and adopting right-wing rhetoric to appeal to Conservative voters. A common complaint from his MPs has been that it's not just that Starmer doesn't listen to them—he doesn't even talk to them. Disloyalty is punished with immediate expulsion or suspension. Disciplinary action is slow-walked to drag out suspensions for non-right MPs, while improper behavior for the right is either brushed under the carpet or outright ignored—perhaps most obviously in the nomination of right-wing darling Peter Mandelson for the U.S. ambassador role, despite his extremely cozy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein having been public knowledge since 2009. And threats to Starmer himself were crushed or kept away from power; Andy Burnham, who is likely to be Prime Minister by July 17, was prevented in standing for Parliament precisely because Starmer saw him as a threat.
Electorally, this has proven to be a catastrophic error in judgment; hard-left figures who have been kicked out of the party have successfully stood against Labour challengers for their seats or jumped ship to the Greens, while the right-friendly rhetoric has completely failed to attract any anti-immigrant voters, who think it's disingenuous and would rather vote for the authentic racism of the Reform Party. Labour have cratered in the polls and took staggering losses in the local elections last month. But even this would not be a problem for most leaders. Every government takes losses in the locals, and even hugely successful PMs like Tony Blair or Harold Wilson had similar punishing council election results in their time.
The issue is that Starmer's open contempt for the majority of his own party has left him with no one to come out in support of him. Where Wilson or Blair could rely on figures from all three wings to come out after a defeat and rally the troops, holding their coalition together, Starmer has no friends left to do so. The soft-left dislike him, the hard-left are actively standing against him, and the right of the party immediately betrayed him and attempted a coup on behalf of their actual favored son, Wes Streeting (a coup that failed because Streeting could not even muster the 81 nominations, showing just how small the right really are).
And so, despite having the second-largest majority of any Labour prime minister in history, Starmer has become the shortest-serving, and the first to be overthrown by his own party. His will be a cautionary tale for what happens when a British leader becomes over-reliant on one wing of the party to the exclusion of the others.
Thanks, R.O.!
We are, of course, interested in the nuts and bolts of this situation, and understanding the tactical mistakes that Starmer made. That said, given our focus on American politics, we are even more interested in the meaning of a generally stable democracy like the U.K. having seven different leaders in just over a decade. Sometimes, that nation goes through 3-4 PMs in relatively short order, due to death or political instability or the like. But seven in 10 years is unprecedented, especially for a country that had just five PMs in the 37 years between 1979 and 2016.
Clearly, as we have pointed out, we are in a "throw the bums out" era right now, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Nations around the world (with, admittedly, a few exceptions) are throwing leaders out about as quickly as they can, often shifting from one end of the political spectrum to the other. But why?
That is a really difficult question to answer, especially without the benefit of hindsight. If we knew when this period of throwing the bums out came to an end, who ended it, and how, then we'd have a much better basis for conclusions. But we know none of those things right now. So, all we can do is guess. And this is our best shot at trying to untangle what's going on.
First, the world is clearly in a period of intense change. There's all the technology, from social media to streaming video to AI. There's climate change. There's large-scale immigration. There are new ideas about race and, in particular, gender. Change is hard for many people, and societies usually tend to respond poorly to it, particularly when it is so much, so fast. This is something of a herd mentality thing, and not so easy for leaders to tame or channel.
Second, the world is increasingly interconnected. Globalized, they call it. That means more immigration pressure, to start. It also means that regional wars (Ukraine, Israel) tend to drag half the world in, on some level. But maybe most important, it's hard enough for a leader to change course for the ship of state when that state is operating independently. Given all the interconnectness today, it's gotta be several orders of magnitude harder to effect meaningful change.
Third, the global economy is pretty strong, and largely has been for 10+ years. And yet, so much of what drives politics these days is economic discontent. The 10 years of revolving PMs coincides exactly with Brexit, which began with a Conservative-sponsored referendum on continued EU membership that was held on June 23, 2016. And that period coincides almost exactly with Trumpism, as well.
The only way to reconcile the strength of the economy with the economic discontent of so many people is wealth inequality. At the height of the Gilded Age in the U.S., a period that also featured much social upheaval and frequent changes of leadership, the top 1% held about 31.4% of the wealth. That figure declined through 1980s or so (ahem, the Reagan presidency), at which point it began trending upward again. Today, according to the Federal Reserve, the top 1% hold... 31.6%. There is little question that such concentration of wealth is very bad for society as a whole. But it's not so easy for a leader to cause the Elon Musks of the world to give up their trillions, either willingly or not-so-willingly.
Turning back to the Brits for a moment, let's share a letter from another British reader, V.W. in Wilts, England, UK:
It's all very well to get rid of Sir Keir Starmer on the basis he has the charisma of a mouldy dishcloth. But I've yet to hear what Andy Burnham (if indeed, it is to be he):
The country's problems will not be fixed simply with a Northern accent and a different pair of spectacles.
- Should do differently, or
- Intends to do differently, or
- Could do differently within the strictures of: (a) the public finances and (b) the same Labour caucus facing Starmer, not to mention (c) Russian aggression, (d) an energy crisis and (e) a lunatic in the White House.
Whether it's the U.K. or the U.S. or France or Germany or Brazil or any of the other nations who have soured on their leaders, we think #3 is really the key. There are so many constraints right now, changing leadership tends to amount to putting lipstick on a pig. Who knows when the dam will break; the only thing we can really add is that the original Progressive Era was a global phenomenon, and then next era of reform likely will be, too. (Z)