The ritual of the UK prime ministerial resignation is now all too familiar: the lectern in Downing Street, the premier blinking in the daylight; the catch in the voice as they finish their statement. That Sir Keir Starmer is the fifth British leader to have stood down midterm since the Brexit vote 10 years ago displays how deeply the country has fallen into a damaging habit that it badly needs to break. The effort to do so now shifts to the man set to succeed Starmer: Andy Burnham.
A root cause of the leadership carousel is the stagnation in living standards and deterioration of public services since the 2008 financial crisis, exacerbated by Brexit and the Covid pandemic. Recently it has often stemmed from party members electing leaders based more on their grassroots appeal than their likely capabilities in office.
Starmer’s tragedy is that he was supposed to represent a reassertion of competence over charisma. History will remember his achievement in purging the Labour Party of its hard-left Corbynite wing within a single parliament after its 2019 election rout. But in his determination not to unsettle voters or financial markets he came into office with too narrow a plan to deal with the trickiest inheritance since Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979, and without a narrative to carry voters and his own MPs with him.