LONDON — Everyone says that Britain isn’t supposed to work like this, that the chaos of chewing through six prime ministers in a decade is just “not normal” for one of the most stable and ancient democracies in the world.
But what if it is?
As Andy Burnham prepares in all likelihood to become the seventh person in 10 years tasked with forming a government, he stands to inherit a Labour party full of inexperienced MPs who have — sometimes literally — grown up in the era of Brexit politics.
Of the 103 Labour MPs who publicly demanded Prime Minister Keir Starmer resign in recent weeks, 63 were newly elected to parliament in 2024. Most had little or no direct experience of the House of Commons in the era before 2016, a far more stable period in which the country had only eight prime ministers in almost 50 years.
Several Labour MPs — including Sam Carling and Rosie Wrighting, both of whom called for Starmer to go — were still teenagers when the U.K. voted to leave the European Union exactly 10 years ago.
When it comes to the wrongs and rights of toppling party leaders, many of them just don’t know any other way to operate.
“They are just as bad as the Tories,” said one former senior official, granted anonymity to speak frankly. “Wrecking premierships, instead of addressing the policy problems that the country faces.”
While changing leaders mid-term is not unusual in the sweep of British political history, doing so at the current rate is rare. And this rapid-fire environment is what Burnham will have to navigate if he becomes Labour leader and prime minister, as expected, in the weeks ahead.
“Since 1945, the majority of prime ministers have come in mid-term,” said Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “But is there something going on where they have less time in which to make some mistakes and recover from them? And is that partly because this is learned behavior? I think it may well be.”
Unintended consequences
Initially, at least, the breakdown of party discipline in U.K. politics was quite deliberate.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who called the Brexit referendum, formally suspended collective Cabinet responsibility during the campaign and allowed his MPs to support whichever side they liked.
“For 10 years I had fought to keep the Tory Party united over Europe,” Cameron recalled in For the Record, his memoir. “This was the moment it would begin to divide again, with friends and colleagues taking opposing sides on an issue of fundamental national importance.”
Cameron, of course, lost the referendum and promptly resigned a few hours later. Having spent the whole campaign insisting he would not walk away if the country voted to leave against his advice (he campaigned for remain), he then did exactly that.
His decision to quit started what now looks like a trend.
Revolving door
A few weeks after Cameron left, Theresa May took over as prime minister promising to “make a success of” Brexit, but made a mess of a general election the following spring and was forced out herself two years after that.
Boris Johnson then took over, winning a big majority in 2019 but losing the confidence of his party after a procession of scandals culminated in a mass walkout of his ministers in 2022. “As we’ve seen at Westminster,” Johnson said as he announced his resignation on the steps of Downing Street where Starmer made his statement on Monday, “the herd instinct is powerful — and when the herd moves, it moves.”
For a few weeks that autumn, Liz Truss was Britain’s prime minister, before it was her turn to be trampled underfoot by her own MPs. They then gave the job to Rishi Sunak for a final two-year period until he lost to Starmer in 2024.
After winning in a landslide, Starmer promised to end the “chaos” and bring stability back to the way the country was run, in order to “tread more lightly” on voters’ lives. In other words, he would make politics boring again.
But for both the country and his own MPs, impatient for the “change” he had promised and perhaps raised on a diet of drama, boring and competent administration was not enough.
Stumbles and U-turns
In the eyes of his many critics, Starmer did not even deliver that. His time in office will be remembered for its many U-turns on key policies under pressure from the MPs he was supposed to lead. Voters lost track of what he was trying to do, and what he was trying to undo.
And there was a visceral dislike of Starmer as a character that pollsters studying focus groups found hard to explain. His popularity plummeted further and faster than that of any previous prime minister.
Within a year of achieving a historic victory, Labour had fallen behind Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK in the polls, and proceeded to lose local and regional elections as well.
For Labour MPs it became impossible to ignore the rage of a more fickle electorate, whose dynamics had been shaped by the Brexit debate. While Europe is no longer a particularly salient issue for most voters, the split into pro- and anti-Brexit blocs, on the right and the left, is still shaping elections, according to a recent study.
At the same time, voters, it seems, have less patience with their politicians.
Generation Brexit
Whereas new governments used to enjoy a predictable honeymoon period on taking office, the public is no longer prepared to wait long for results. “I do think voters are now less forgiving, and because the electorate is more volatile, the MPs are more volatile too,” Cowley said. “The pressures MPs are facing are different than they used to be.”
Starmer spooked Labour MPs by leading them toward an electoral death zone where they face being wiped out as a political force. Dismal election losses in Wales, Scotland and across local governments in England last month confirmed that a year of terrible poll ratings for Labour had been no illusion. “I wonder now whether there’s a default or an earlier switch to thinking, ‘Well, we could get rid of the leader,’” Cowley said.
The task for Burnham, if he is confirmed as prime minister, will be no easier than it was for Starmer — or for Sunak, Truss, Johnson or May. He is widely seen as a better communicator than Starmer and more able to connect with voters, especially in the north of England. And he showed he could defeat Farage’s Reform UK in last week’s Makerfield by-election.
But he has no direct mandate, other than the support of fewer than 25,000 voters in his new constituency, and no published plan for what he wants to do in power. He wasn’t even an MP the last time the British public had a chance to vote for a new government.
Burnham will need to translate his distinctly local victory into national success with voters far from his home turf, and soon. If he doesn’t, it may not be long before Generation Brexit MPs again start to wonder if someone else might do a better job.
