Starmer's end: Can seventh prime minister in 10 years save Britain?

[marmar]

Starmer’s end: Can seventh prime minister in 10 years save Britain?
Britain's incoming PM has charisma and energy. Is that enough to halt the post-Brexit downward slide?

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published June 24, 2026 8:10AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.

....(snip)....

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.

....(snip)....

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.

....(snip)....

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.) ............................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/06/24/starmers-end-can-seventh-prime-minister-in-10-years-save-britain/

[in2herbs]

1. IMO 7 PMs in 10 years indicates the problem is with the politics these guys are peddling. nt