Witnessing the abrupt ending to a political career is never an edifying spectacle. Some defeated or disgraced leaders handle it better than others, but the level of ego inflation that leads people into electoral politics in the first place does not tend to be accompanied by grace or humility. Many Americans have spent most of the last decade fruitlessly longing for the final and conclusive downfall of our current president, as in the last act of an action thriller. I suspect that no such event will ever occur, but if it does it probably won’t follow that sort of script or deliver a satisfactory catharsis.
Keir Starmer’s predecessor as British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, will be remembered by historians largely as a footnote. He was the wealthiest person ever to hold that office, as well as the first person of color. He presided over a catastrophic electoral defeat nearly two years ago that consigned the Conservative Party, after 14 years in power, to a distant third- or fourth-place status in the upside-down universe of post-Brexit U.K. politics.
But Sunak’s exit, strangely enough, was dignified. He resigned immediately, without suggesting that he should cling to office as a “caretaker” while the new government got up and running. The election had been lost weeks or months earlier, and he seemed positively relieved to surrender the poisoned chalice of 10 Downing Street and get back to being the kind of upper-crust Londoner who bangs around in first-class cabins and limousines, and is occasionally recognized by the hoi polloi.
Starmer’s end, which arrived this week, was not like that at all. It was more like watching a friendless pirate being made to walk the plank for other people’s misdeeds, or watching a man slowly bleed out on the sidewalk (that’s pavement, for our British readers) while a crowd of bystanders upload the spectacle to Instagram. On Monday, he announced his decision to step down as leader of the ruling Labour Party, which also means — as in most parliamentary democracies — resigning as prime minister. His replacement will become the U.K.’s seventh P.M. in a decade, going back to David Cameron and the Brexit election, and if that sounds more like the incomprehensible chaos of Italian politics in the 1980s, you’re on the right track.
Starmer came into office as a waterlogged paper tiger, without a core of devoted loyalists, and proceeded to destroy his credibility with a series of minor scandals, policy reversals and unhappy compromises, ending with a sweeping defeat in local elections.
In a certain sense, this decision arrived suddenly, since even late last week Starmer still hoped to fend off a possible leadership challenge within Labour. But in another sense it was the culmination of a slow, torturous process of resignations, abandonments and ever-worsening news, capped by the return to Parliament of former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, Starmer’s principal intra-party rival. It now appears nearly certain that there will be no Labour leadership contest as such, and that Burnham will be moving his family into Downing Street within a few weeks.
One should avoid performing amateur psychoanalysis on public figures, and especially on someone as profoundly uncharismatic and inexpressive as Starmer, but it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that he felt both wounded and betrayed by this turn of events. You can’t entirely blame him: It was he, after all, who led Labour to its historic July 2024 victory over Sunak and the Tories, winning 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
As I have repeatedly argued, and as has become abundantly clear over the last two years, Labour’s huge parliamentary majority was an illusion, or at least an artifact of Britain’s democratic dysfunction. Those who sought to read it as a reassuring public shift back toward sensible centrism — an interpretation almost unanimously favored by mainstream commentators, as it happens — were ignoring the obvious evidence in favor of a self-flattering narrative.
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Labour won all those seats in 2024 on 33.7% of the national vote in a low-turnout election, receiving half a million fewer votes than they did under the since-purged leftist leader Jeremy Corbyn in the supposedly disastrous defeat of 2019. That outcome was created by the U.K.’s “first past the post” electoral system (for the most part, the same as ours), which works adequately well in a two-party duopoly but becomes massively undemocratic when three or more political parties are in play.
Britain now has at least four viable parties in most parts of the country, and often five: Along with Labour and the diminished Tories, there are Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK on the right (currently leading in the polls), the Liberal Democrats in the center and the Greens threatening Labour from the left, without counting regional nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Given that political landscape, Starmer was exactly the wrong man for the job, a bland, genial, lawyerly figure with no discernible ideology or distinctive set of policies. He came into office as a waterlogged paper tiger, with no core of devoted loyalists, and proceeded to destroy his credibility with a series of minor scandals, policy reversals and unhappy compromises, capped by sweeping defeats in regional and local elections a few weeks ago. He was inevitably compared to Joe Biden, which was deeply unfair — to Biden, who had genuine legislative accomplishments and a reservoir of goodwill among Democratic voters.
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Now the poisoned chalice will be passed to Burnham, apparently without a struggle, for reasons that have more to do with desperation than political logic. He’s identified with the “soft left” of the Labour Party, a meaningless expression meant to convey that he’s not a Tony Blair-style neoliberal or a Corbyn-style socialist (although he eagerly supported both of those former Labour leaders earlier in his career). He certainly possesses qualities Starmer lacks: Burnham is a charismatic, engaging speaker with a vaguely working-class background and roots in the post-industrial north of England, territory Labour has largely lost to the Reform hard right, much as Democrats have lost the Rust Belt to MAGA. (He will also be only the second Catholic prime minister, once an unimaginable concept. The first, bizarrely enough, was Boris Johnson.)
Burnham’s only real qualification, to be sure, is that he offers Labour voters hope that the U.K.’s post-Brexit downward slide — by all possible measures of economic well-being, public sentiment and quality of life — can be arrested or reversed long enough to fend off the ghoulish Farage in the next national election, which could be three or four years away. (Elections on a regular basis, you say? How vulgar!) That too is a triumph of narrative over evidence, but human beings tend to work that way.
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