Before we get into this, you have to understand how the UK’s parliamentary system works. (Brits, Parliament-watchers, and fans of The Crown, just scroll down: This is old hat to you.)
Unlike in the US, where voters choose the president in a national election, Brits elect members of Parliament. Then, the leader of whichever party wins the majority becomes prime minister (at least usually — there can also be minority governments by coalition).
PMs change when parties lose elections. But they can also change when a ruling party decides it's had enough of its leader, as the center-left Labour Party just decided of Starmer.
Who is Keir Starmer?
Starmer has never exactly been a triumphant figure in British politics. When the Labour Party came to power in 2024 after 14 years of Conservative (or Tory) rule, Brits didn’t see the win as a reflection of Starmer’s personal appeal or an endorsement of his platform — they were just really sick of the Conservatives.
Starmer, a former prosecutor and human rights lawyer, staked out an awkward set of positions that tried to square with this mandate. He embraced a liberal economic agenda while tacking right on culture issues, including trans rights and immigration. He also promised to restore stability and normalcy to 10 Downing Street after years of upheaval and shenanigans, ranging from Boris Johnson’s Covid-19 lockdown parties to Liz Truss’s truncated month-and-change in office.
Why is Starmer getting the boot now?
Starmer’s polling numbers really are dismal: by one measure, Truss is the only recent PM who polls worse. And Starmer is unpopular not only with the opposition, but also increasingly with members of Labour.
Starmer’s party soured on him after several embarrassing policy reversals and his rightward drift on issues including immigration. That discontent intensified earlier this year, when the release of the Epstein files revealed that the man Starmer had appointed to the US ambassadorship was close with Epstein and potentially passed internal documents to him.
“The selling point of Labour when it was in opposition wasn’t that it was going to fix everything. It was, ‘We’re going to bring some honesty and stability that was so palpably lacking under the Conservatives,’” Anand Menon, a political commentator and professor at King’s College London, told my colleague Joshua Keating a few months ago. (But appointing an ambassador who palled around with Epstein didn’t precisely scream “honest” and “stable.”)
As for why Starmer resigned now, he was facing a possible challenge from within his party: Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, who is now expected to succeed him. Burnham won a special election to Parliament last week and promptly signaled he was angling for the PM seat.
Why have the Brits been through so many PMs?
This helps explain why Starmer is out as PM — but it doesn’t explain the revolving door that preceded him. David Cameron got a good six years as British prime minister, from 2010 to 2016. In the decade since, no PM has lasted longer than three years at a stretch, which is unusual by modern British standards.
But the UK has recently contended with a series of domestic crises that created the conditions for this kind of political chaos. The 2008 financial crisis hit the UK particularly hard, for instance. Conservative efforts to recover from it involved deep, long-lasting cuts to infrastructure and social services.
The Great Recession and the Eurozone debt crisis that followed also helped stoke enthusiasm for Brexit, the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. But that withdrawal was economically painful for the UK, and Brexit has since become unpopular.
How much does this matter to me, an American?
A bit! The UK is one of America’s oldest and strongest allies, and the past decade-plus of political turmoil has arguably made it weaker. “No one talks about ‘global Britain’ anymore,” former British diplomat Nick Witney told Josh in 2024. “It’s extraordinary how our horizons have shrunk.”
Starmer’s collapse may also serve as a warning of sorts to other center-left politicians. There is, for instance, a strain of Democratic thinkers here in the US who advocate for an American-accented version of Starmerism — one that marries left-wing economic ideas with more moderate or center-right cultural positions.
That strategy didn’t work for Starmer, obviously. But we don’t know if the problem lay with the strategy or the man himself. If it’s the former, that could have implications for US politics.
