Keir Starmer took his final prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons yesterday and will officially resign as British prime minister next Monday, after just two years in office and having led the Labour Party to a landslide victory in the July 2024 general election.
The circumstances of his departure are unusual by modern British standards. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, the last four Conservative prime ministers, all had relatively short tenures, but there were compelling reasons why they had to leave office.
May faced unprecedented losses when trying to get her Brexit bill through parliament. Johnson was brought down by allegations of breaking the law while in office and lying to parliament. Truss crashed the UK bond market within 30 days of entering Downing Street and Sunak presided over a crushing election defeat.
Starmer was guilty of misjudgments, such as the proposed cut to the winter fuel allowance, which was subsequently abandoned. But Tony Blair, the last Labour leader to win a UK election, faced bigger crises and was embroiled in a number of scandals during his first two years in office.
READ MORE
Starmer was seen as an honest broker by other international leaders and went a long way towards repairing the UK’s reputation, which has taken a battering post-Brexit. His leadership was derailed by his lack of political popularity, with too many of his MPs concluding that their prospects of getting re-elected were fatally undermined by his continued premiership.
This exposes what has the potential to become the Gordian knot of British politics. Only painful reforms will put the UK economy back in the right direction. But Labour MPs balked at those reforms under Starmer because of the public backlash. In truth, Starmer is just the latest symptom of the UK’s inability to adjust to the harsh economic and political realities of life after Brexit. Changing leaders every few years will not alter that underlying reality, as the next prime minister, Andy Burnham, surely already realises.
