london —
Anthony Seldon has written biographies of each of the past eight British Prime Ministers. When he embarked on the project in the 1990s, the task was enormous but measured. The resident of No. 10 Downing Street then held the office for several years, allowing him to properly scrutinize his subjects as they marked their own times.
But Seldan is now in danger of being swallowed up by events. Mr Seldon had hoped that Keir Starmer’s victory in 2024 would herald a return to political normality after recent leadership changes under the previous Conservative government, which saw three leaders change in a year. Starmer’s Labor Party won an overwhelming majority in parliament and promised “10 years” of national regeneration.
But less than two years after Starmer became prime minister, he may already be on his way out. Mr Starmer’s colleagues appear ready to oust him after voters decisively rejected Labour’s candidates in local elections in England, Scotland and Wales. Seldon’s biography of Starmer’s predecessor Rishi Sunak is due to be published in August. By then, Britain may have a new prime minister, its sixth in seven years. At 72 years old, Cerdon worries that he is forever playing catch-up.
In an interview with CNN, Mr Seldon said with a sigh: “It won’t be long before we’ll have Angela Reiner in number 10,” referring to Labor MPs who are seen as one of Mr Starmer’s potential rivals as prime minister.
The revolving door at 10 Downing Street has left many in the country wondering: Has Britain become ungovernable?
There are several problems in Britain. The country never truly recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, real wages have been largely stagnant, only recently trending upward following the inflation shock caused by the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine.
On the other hand, it is estimated that GDP per capita has fallen by up to 8% due to the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU). Productivity growth is slow. Debt is slowly rising, meaning UK government bond yields are the highest among the Group of Seven (G7) countries. The UK also has the highest industrial electricity costs in this group.
There are also tensions in the electoral system. Britain’s first-past-the-post system works best when there are two dominant political parties. For more than a century, those were the Labor Party and the Conservative Party. But the decline of that duopoly has effectively transformed British politics from a two-way contest in England to a five-way contest in England and a six-party contest in Scotland and Wales, with the two historic parties now competing with the centrist Liberal Democrats, the ultra-progressive Greens, the hard-right Reform Britain, and even nationalist parties supporting independence for Scotland and Wales, potentially leading to a fractured Britain. Scotland has been part of England since 1707 and Wales since 1536.
There is a temptation to say that against such a tide of hardship, good government has become almost impossible in Britain, and that it will be difficult for any leader to swim against the tide.
But Seldon believes this despair will only acquit Starmer and his less-than-impressive predecessors.
“The UK is definitely not ungovernable, although some recent Prime Ministers (PMs) have tried very hard to make it so,” he told CNN.
Seldon sees Starmer’s Tory forerunners continuing to fail. He broadly describes Boris Johnson as “Roosevelt-esque” because of his preference for big government and his interest in “left behind” regions, but he says that this is only “ambition, not realization.”
Liz Truss was a “Reaganist” because of her ideological commitment to libertarian economics, Seldon said, going on to compare the British prime minister to the US president. In a bid to reverse Johnson’s overreach, Truss introduced an unfunded tax cut plan in 2022 that brought Britain’s financial markets to the brink of meltdown. With the Bank of England reluctant to rescue her, the Conservative Party ousted Ms Truss after just 49 days in office, making her Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister.
Rishi Sunak was “kind of a Hooverite”, favoring austerity and smaller states. But by the time Mr Sunak became prime minister, the country was exhausted by the Conservative Party and had been so damaged by Mr Truss that it was never likely that Asia’s first UK prime minister would win the 2024 election, he added.
But in the case of Starmer, American parallels hardly come to mind. Starmer does not reflect a political project, but rather a personality. “There’s an element of Jimmy Carter,” Cerdon said. “I thought Starmer was honest, polite, very serious, very enthusiastic, very sincere. But it was overwhelming. It was beyond him.”
He said Mr Starmer was not “big enough” at the moment and instead appeared to be swayed by events and unable to go against the tide. After dozens of his colleagues called for his resignation following last week’s election results, Mr Starmer instead promised to “reset” the prime minister’s job again. But his speech on Monday offered a vague explanation of his new approach and largely restated his current agenda. “To declare it an agenda-setting speech and then have nothing to offer,” Cerdon said. “It was shocking.”
To Ben Ansell, a political scientist at the University of Oxford, Starmer is similar to “a doctor who comes to the bedside of a seriously ill patient and says in a way, ‘God, that’s terrible. Someone has to do something.'” But in his nearly two years in office, Ansell told CNN, Starmer has done little to explain what “hard medicine” he would prescribe to improve Britain.
Mr Starmer ruled out raising three major sources of tax during his 2024 election campaign, leaving the government constrained and forced to seek revenue from smaller and politically unpopular sources.
“They picked the ‘bad guys’ – private schools, farmers, banks – and beat them up, but that didn’t give them enough money to do much for anyone else,” Ansell said. “They made many enemies, but not many friends.”
He added that these policy failures might have been forgivable if Mr Starmer had a strong political story. In Britain, a good story goes a long way, even if it destroys the country. When Prime Minister David Cameron went to bed in Britain after the 2008 financial crisis, his diagnosis was clear. The previous Labor government’s view was that it had spent too much and that a period of painful tightening was needed to restore Britain’s fiscal health.
The Conservative Party has failed to pave the way for growth. Austerity was aimed at reducing Britain’s debt and supporting Britain’s recovery, but both failed in that the debt ballooned and economic growth has slumped ever since. Despite this, Mr Ansell pointed out that Prime Minister David Cameron was re-elected in 2015, having achieved some economic growth in the year before the election, having “kept hammering home” the message that Britain needed to “trim its sails” throughout his first term.
Mr Starmer, by contrast, had no poignant message. He promised “change” but did not say what or how. “The Prime Minister is the main storyteller in this country, but Mr Starmer had no story,” Mr Seldan said.
Still, Starmer’s government may be tottering along. He vowed not to resign and return Britain to the “chaos” that flourished under the Conservative government. Some experts have warned that just as English football clubs have become addicted to changing managers, Britain has become “addicted” to changing prime ministers.
Mr Starmer’s allies point out how much better Britain is. This week, under the Conservative government, waiting lists for the National Health Service (NHS) suffered the biggest non-pandemic monthly decline since 2008. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who resigned this week, said the NHS was on track to achieve the fastest “lower waiting times” in its history. Others point to how Starmer has restored Britain’s credibility on the world stage after years of conflict with Europe over Brexit.
Mr Starmer’s allies complain that things are getting better but the public is unaware or uninterested, and is instead being swayed by “snake oil” sold by reformers and the Greens, who they say could lead Britain down a “very dark path”.
However, the prime minister must give a sense of his accomplishments. “If you’re a bad salesperson, no matter how good the product you’re selling, no matter how harmless it is in this case, every time you try to sell it, it gets worse,” Ansell says.
Britain risks reading too much into Mr Starmer’s woes, but there is little mystery about it, he said. “A guy who has no charisma and can’t sell has turned out to be really bad at selling and is widely disliked by the public. Is that fair? I don’t know, but that’s how the public is reacting.”
In a bid to salvage their electoral chances, many Labor MPs are turning to a better salesman: Greater Manchester’s Labor Mayor Andy Burnham, Britain’s most popular politician in most opinion polls. While Mr Starmer has been accused of a lack of vision, Mr Burnham has defended “Manchesterism”. This is an “ambitious”, business-friendly brand of socialism that seeks to bring essential services back under public control. Thanks to his policies, Manchester became the fastest growing city in the country.
Burnham’s path to Downing Street is difficult and uncertain. He must first win a seat in Parliament before he can challenge Mr Starmer’s leadership of the Labor Party. Hoping to make way for Mr Burnham, a Labor MP resigned from the Greater Manchester seat of Makerfield this week, triggering a special election, likely pitting Mr Burnham against a Reform candidate.
The stakes are no more. From Manchester, Burnham began to look like the last chance for Labor, which had all but given up on Starmer. If Burnham loses the special election to the Reformers, it could spell the death knell for Labour’s electoral prospects for years to come and push Britain further down the “dark path” Mr Starmer warned of. If that happens, Britain may become truly ungovernable.
