The Torture Chamber of British Politics Crushes Its Latest Prime Minister
Almost ten years to the day since British voters expressed their dissatisfaction with the nation’s general direction and political class—that time by choosing to leave the European Union—the country’s latest unpopular Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, gave up the ghost and admitted that leading the United Kingdom was beyond him, too. Starmer lasted slightly less than two years in the job; longer than some, shorter than others on the list of the seven most recent British Prime Ministers, all of whom have failed to serve a full term in office with a majority in the House of Commons. Tony Blair was the last British leader to do that, more than twenty years ago.
Six Prime Ministers have now resigned since the Brexit vote, in 2016. The sight of the lectern being carried out onto Downing Street, followed by the short, poignant farewell address, has taken on a ritual familiarity, with each departure colored by particular dismay. David Cameron, the first to go, hummed wistfully as he turned for the door. Theresa May looked truly shattered. “Them’s the breaks,” Boris Johnson surmised. Liz Truss glittered with anger. Rishi Sunak seemed eager to be gone. On Monday morning, Starmer, whose resignation has appeared inevitable for some time, delivered the news with his customary straightforwardness. “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” he said. “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question. And I accept that answer with good grace.”
Starmer has been easy to criticize since he took office, two summers ago, after Labour won a resounding, if shallow, victory in the general election. Starmer’s campaign had a one-word slogan, “Change,” which he failed to deliver. Part of that failure was the result of his own cussedness and part was the fault of his advisers, who always seemed more concerned with banishing the leftist traces of the Jeremy Corbyn years—or countering the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. Party—than acting on any political principles of their own. But the larger, sadder obstacle for Starmer was that, in the past decade, the job of the British Prime Minister has become terribly constrained. It is like a room in which there is perpetually less air to breathe and fewer possibilities for escape. In the summer of 2018, when I was reporting a profile of May, the first post-Brexit Prime Minister, one of her ministers likened her to a prisoner in Little Ease, a medieval torture chamber in the Tower of London, where it was impossible to stand, sit, or lie down. “It is getting tighter and tighter,” the former Minister observed.
At the time, the metaphor seemed to work because of the particular dilemmas posed by Brexit. Now it holds for other reasons, too. For the past decade, the British economy has flatlined, while its population has become older, sicker, and no more productive. Any Prime Minister, whatever their personal gifts or inclinations, must contend with the fact that more than half of government spending—some six hundred billion pounds a year—is now allotted to three line items: the National Health Service, welfare spending, and debt repayment. All of these are growing in absolute and relative terms, and together they eat away at other opportunities for the state. Brexit permanently diminished the U.K.’s position in international affairs, and the country has yet to find a comfortable home either outside of or reattached, in some fashion, to the E.U. No one likes any of this. The bond markets hate it. The public is fed up. The Prime Minister is blamed.
Starmer endured his two-year confinement in Little Ease with caution and stoicism, acting as though, if he stayed still, one day the walls would expand again of their own accord. With this approach, he was not dissimilar to May or Sunak, two other basically sensible Prime Ministers who also scaled down their plans in order to survive. (To live in the U.K. is to live in a country that is always scaling down its plans.) Johnson pretended that he wasn’t a prisoner at all; Truss tried to blow up the Tower of London.
The next Prime Minister will likely be Andy Burnham, the fifty-six-year-old, recently departed mayor of Manchester. Shortly before Starmer announced his resignation, on Monday morning, Burnham boarded a train to London to be sworn in as the new Member of Parliament for Makerfield, a seat just outside of the city, and one which he won comfortably in an election last week. Burnham was a young Cabinet minister in Gordon Brown’s Labour government, some nineteen years ago, but he has benefitted from his years away from Westminster, and from Manchester’s feel-good vibes and relative prosperity under his leadership, an approach now known as “Manchesterism.”
Burnham has natural political advantages that Starmer never enjoyed; he comes across as relaxed and comfortable in his own skin. He has a northern hinterland rather than a North London one, which made Starmer seem metropolitan and out of touch. Since becoming Starmer’s most likely successor, Burnham has been careful not to say too much, which is understandable. But this means that he has already chosen not to challenge some of the constraints that will soon bind him. In Makerfield, which voted for Brexit in 2016 and where Reform U.K. won the recent local elections, Burnham confirmed that he would not seek to lead Britain back into the E.U. And whereas, as mayor of Manchester, Burnham was willing to suggest that the country needed to get “beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets” by borrowing more, to invest in the economy, he has since agreed to follow the same fiscal rules as Starmer’s government did.
On Monday morning, before Starmer’s resignation and Burnham’s arrival in London, Mainstream, a Labour think tank that is reportedly close to Burnham’s team, published “The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism,” a sixty-nine-page policy essay, describing a long-term program to increase public ownership of housing and utilities such as water and energy. It is the kind of aspirational, center-left vision that Starmer would have once endorsed. We won’t have to wait long to discover how much Manchesterism Burnham actually wants, or is able, to put into practice. In his resignation speech, Starmer suggested that the next leader of the Labour Party—the Prime Minister—should be in office by September. Less than an hour later, Wes Streeting, Burnham’s only real rival for the position, said that he would support Burnham instead. Any leadership contest is likely to be a formality. The chamber awaits. ♦