By Azu Ishiekwene
It was painful to watch him outside No.10 on Monday. Despite his immaculate suit and well-groomed hair, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer looked like he was facing a public execution.
The bespoke podium, which had been in use since David Cameron’s tenure, looked more like a stake, and Starmer’s valedictory like a miserere before the bullets would be discharged.
The carnage that British politics has become has just claimed its sixth prime minister in a decade. Britain is not doing as badly as Italy – yet – which had 50 governments and 15 prime ministers between 1946 and 1994, but at the current rate, it’s not doing badly at becoming Europe’s next Britaly, as The Economist once described it.
Which is all difficult to understand, given that for the two-and-a-half years of his premiership, Starmer never failed to remind voters that he came to power in one of the largest electoral landslides in recent British history.
Not entirely untrue. Labour won 411 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, a majority of 174 seats over all other parties combined. Starmer’s Labour was the largest party in England, Scotland and Wales, and the first government since 2010 to end 14 years of Conservative rule.
Landslide, backslide
So, what happened? Boris Johnson, who had a chaotic and scandal-ridden premiership, has suggested that Starmer won because the Conservatives collapsed rather than due to voter enthusiasm for Labour.
He told Sky News that Starmer lost because he was a stumbling block who stood in the way instead of providing vision and leadership, virtues that I’m not sure Johnson would recognise, even in plain sight.
He was being half-clear. He conveniently forgot that his wrong-headed decision to remove Britain from the European Union is part of the price his successors, including Starmer, have had to pay. Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, will also be paying for it.
A study by researchers affiliated with institutions including the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Bank of England estimated that by 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by between six and eight per cent relative to a non-Brexit scenario.
Business investment was down nearly 18 per cent, while productivity and employment also went down. Post-Brexit, the British economy has been fragile, and the cost-of-living crisis has taken a toll on the middle class and pensioners. Young British adults are poorer than their parents were.
Complications, complications
Yet, none of this should have come as a surprise to Starmer. He knew that the economy was fragile, that the cost of living was rising, and public services were stretched when he campaigned to provide economic stability, fiscal discipline and a competent government.
When he positioned himself as everything to everyone, that strategic ambivalence helped him to win; it couldn’t keep him in power. He not only knew the mess that Brexit had left the country in, but he also knew that the country was yet to fully recover from the COVID-19 supply chain disruptions and massive payouts, which added billions of pounds to the national debt, apart from the losses to fraud, estimated by a Reuters report at £10.9 billion.
The US-Israel war on Iran has piled on the chaotic fallouts of the Russia-Ukraine war, raising food prices and energy costs around the world and forcing many UK households to deal with levels of inflation that they had not experienced for years. Every UK prime minister after Johnson – from Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak and Starmer – has had to contend with the economic legacy of three successive shocks: Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and now, the Middle East crisis.
Politics, poetry and prose
Yet, when politicians campaign, their poetry distorts our common sense, and we’re seduced by the hope that perhaps, just perhaps, it might be different this time. But Starmer knew there was not much he could do. When he said before the election that Labour would not increase taxes, for example, he knew he would not find the money to plug the hole. So, he was forced to make a U-turn.
When he promised welfare reforms and fiscal discipline, he knew he was speaking with both sides of his mouth. But that was what his voters, especially his base and the campaign groups, wanted to hear. And when he promised a clean, competent government – a departure from the sleaze years – Peter Mandelson was smiling, waiting to snooker him. The outcome was a shambles for the government’s reputation.
And when Starmer was boasting about a landslide, he knew that the result of the election that brought him to power was more nuanced. It was a victory by default. While Tony Blair, for example, won 43.2 per cent of the popular vote share in 1997, Starmer won only 33.7 per cent, reflecting a far narrower popular mandate than he cared to admit publicly. According to a YouGov Poll, among the people who voted Labour in 2024 and then participated in the 2026 local elections, only 46 per cent remained with Labour. About 22 per cent moved to the Greens, 16 per cent to the Liberal Democrats, while 6 per cent moved to Reform UK.
With a drastic decline in public trust of politicians and public institutions, it’s not surprising that Starmer’s landslide fizzled before he could fully milk it. The palace coup that forced out the Prime Minister was not because Labour MPs loved him less, but because they love themselves more. Wheeling in Burnham from the shadows to No.10 was a move by the Backbenchers to buy time and fend off the lunacy of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party.
Talking big
Burnham has started by announcing big, obviously more left-wing Labour policies, from removing VAT on domestic electricity bills for six months to restoring the £2 cap on single bus fares across England, and from expanded housebuilding to greater public investment outside London. He has also talked about increasing defence spending, while whispers of “nationalisation” have even been heard.
But it won’t be long before he might stumble on the question that has snagged his six predecessors: where will the money come from? Once upon a United Kingdom, when the country was at the peak of its powers, it controlled nearly 20 per cent of the world’s manufacturing output, which, of course, was after it robbed India, among others, of its pre-industrial manufacturing dominance and converted it into a primary producing country. At the height of Britain’s influence, one-quarter of the earth’s surface was its farmland. Those days are gone.
Copying Italy?
The world has changed since Britannia ruled the waves. While Britain remains one of the world’s leading economies, its current sunset phase has taken a heavy toll on its prosperity.
Strong alignment with NATO and the European Community, which later became the EU, helped Italy navigate its turbulent years. Unfortunately, Britain chose to leave the EU when it needed it most.
The last thing the country needs is a premier who sells hope at a high price. Burnham positioned himself as a beacon for his stranded Labour Party. Yet his record in Manchester urges caution. Already, he is making expensive, even extravagant promises that may come back to bite him. At this rate, he may well not be the last prime minister before the general election in 2029.
Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book Writing for Media and Monetising It.
