The Torture Chamber of British Politics Crushes Its Latest Prime Minister

Keir Starmer, the U.K. Prime Minister, speaks outside 10 Downing Street on Monday.Photograph by Chris J. Ratcliffe / Bloomberg / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Almost ten years to the day since British voters expressed their dissatisfaction with the nation’s general direction and political class—that time by choosing to leave the European Union—the country’s latest unpopular Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, gave up the ghost and admitted that leading the United Kingdom was beyond him, too. Starmer lasted slightly less than two years in the job; longer than some, shorter than others on the list of the seven most recent British Prime Ministers, all of whom have failed to serve a full term in office, with a majority in the House of Commons. Tony Blair was the last British leader to do that, more than twenty years ago.

Six Prime Ministers have now resigned since the Brexit vote, in 2016. The sight of the lectern being carried out onto Downing Street, followed by the short, poignant farewell address, has taken on a ritual familiarity, with each departure colored by particular dismay. David Cameron, the first to go, hummed wistfully as he turned for the door. Theresa May looked truly shattered. “Them’s the breaks,” Boris Johnson surmised. Liz Truss glittered with anger. Rishi Sunak seemed eager to be gone. On Monday morning, Starmer, whose resignation has appeared inevitable for some time, delivered the news with his customary straightforwardness. “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” he said. “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question. And I accept that answer with good grace.”

Starmer has been easy to criticize since he took office, two summers ago, after Labour won a resounding, if shallow, victory in the general election. Starmer’s campaign had a one-word slogan, “Change,” which he failed to deliver. Part of that failure was the result of his own cussedness and part was the fault of his advisers, who always seemed more concerned with banishing the leftist traces of the Jeremy Corbyn years—or countering the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. Party—than acting on any political principles of their own. But the larger, sadder obstacle for Starmer was that, in the past decade, the job of the British Prime Minister has become terribly constrained. It is like a room in which there is perpetually less air to breathe and fewer possibilities for escape. In the summer of 2018, when I was reporting a profile of May, the first post-Brexit Prime Minister, one of her ministers likened her to a prisoner in Little Ease, a medieval torture chamber in the Tower of London, where it was impossible to stand, sit, or lie down. “It is getting tighter and tighter,” the former Minister observed.