Starmer bows out

To no-one’s surprise, Britain’s Labour leadership contest has failed to throw up any challenger to Andy Burnham. He will be declared the winner at a special conference later today, and on Monday Keir Starmer will submit his resignation as prime minister, allowing Burnham to be sworn in in his place.

That will make him, on the most widely accepted enumeration, his country’s 59th prime minister. His predecessors are a mixed bag (this post on the first of them, Robert Walpole, explains something of the job’s history), but it’s only fair to acknowledge that many of them faced challenges enormously greater than what greets Burnham. They did not always handle them well, but they muddled through; the country survived and sometimes even prospered.

Those 58 leaders span just over three hundred years, an average of about five and a quarter years each.* But as we noted last month, five prime ministers have now come and gone in the last ten years, none of them from natural causes: one was removed by the electorate and the other four by their colleagues. One of those, Liz Truss, recorded the shortest-ever tenure in the office at fifty days, breaking a record that had stood for almost two centuries.

Until this year one could argue that this rapid turnover was only a problem for the Conservative Party, produced by its own peculiar conflicts over Brexit. But now Labour has joined in as well, disposing of Starmer only two years after he led it to a landslide victory. Is Britain becoming ungovernable?

The jury is still out on that question, but there are some reasons to think that Starmer was just the wrong person for the job at the time. After 14 years in opposition, Labour’s supporters were hungry for change; they expected the government to be bold and dynamic, and they were increasingly alienated by Starmer’s caution and his cold, clinical style. Lacking a traditional party background, he never seemed to understand the need to connect with his base.

In particular, Labour voters did not expect Starmer, faced with a challenge from the far right, to steal its policies and rhetoric. And in a fractured party landscape, taking the base for granted was more than usually dangerous; many promptly defected to the Greens or the Liberal Democrats, while others were seduced by the far-right Reform. Starmer was also unlucky to find in Burnham a popular rival that diverse opponents could rally around. Without that he might have tried to tough it out, but Burnham’s victory in Makerfield made his position untenable.

Starmer’s fate invites comparison with the record of Anthony Albanese in Australia. Superficially the cases are similar: both finding success after a long period in opposition and then governing doggedly from the centre, to the frustration of many of their supporters. Both were also faced by relentless attacks from right-wing media (or “media”). But Albanese had several advantages that Starmer lacked.

Albanese’s first victory gave him only a narrow majority – he could much more plausibly argue that boldness was not what the circumstances called for. His first term also predated the surge of the far right (partly no doubt because his Liberal opponents moved decisively rightwards); that meant that he didn’t face the same pressure from the media to “do something” about “populism”. Perhaps most importantly, Albanese had spent his whole career in the Labor Party: he understood its culture, and by and large his colleagues stayed loyal.

Moderation is not a bad thing. Despite its large parliamentary majority, a government elected with only a third of the vote needs to be careful about presuming on the public’s confidence – something Burnham will have to keep in mind. But too many voters came to see Starmer’s governing style not as reasonable caution but as timidity, aimlessness and paralysis.

Britain’s problems, both imposed and self-inflicted, are serious but they are not insoluble. Labour should be able to do better. Now we’ll see if it can.

* That’s per individual, not per term in office; several served two or more non-consecutive terms, although none has done so in the half century since Harold Wilson.