LONDON, June 26 — There was a time when Britannia ruled the waves. Now the waves rule Britannia. Like a storm-tossed ship’s terrified passengers, the kingdom that once dominated the world has just thrown another of its admirals overboard, abandoned by the masses, the elites, the media, and his own political peers.
Keir Starmer’s two-year premiership lasted longer than Rishi Sunak’s 18 months, not to mention Liz Truss’s 50 days. But with one decade’s seventh prime minister set to enter 10 Downing Street, something is obviously wrong in His Majesty’s realm.
Against this backdrop, Starmer’s downfall was not about his executive performance. On all his main tasks — immigration, growth, and social policy — his delivery was reasonable. Immigration, which peaked at 944,000 in 2023, last year plunged to 171,000; the economy grew faster than the rest of the seven richest democracies; and social reforms included a 4.1% raise in minimum pay, railway nationalizations, and raised taxes on gambling, expensive houses, and private schools.
Like these measures or not, that is what Starmer was elected to do. Why, then, did he fall?
The one scandal pundits mentioned, his appointment of the disgraced Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington, is unconvincing. Yes, it showed mistaken judgment, but it was no Profumo Affair, in which the government fell in 1963 after it emerged that the secretary of defense had slept with a Soviet spy. The better explanation is Labour’s defeat in last month’s local elections, which made its lawmakers panic.
But that is where the deeper questions arise: why panic — there are more than three years until the next general election — and why behead the party leader? The answer is that the panic is because the British political system itself appears to be in crisis. In the corridors of Westminster, what is at stake is not merely a single leader’s fate but the wider picture of a governing class that has lost the confidence of the electorate it claims to serve.
What to watch next is whether the seventh prime minister in a decade can restore any sense of stability, or whether the revolving door at Downing Street will continue to spin. For a nation that once prided itself on steady governance, the pattern is unmistakable.
