Against regicide: Britain needs to stop sacking its Prime Ministers
Is there a realistic and palpably better alternative to Starmer? If not, keep him
Remembrance Sunday is the closest Britain has to a national day but it has become, in recent years, a reminder our new democratic instability. Every living former Prime Minister lines up behind the Cenotaph and their line-up reminds us of the short-termism to which our politics has succumbed. John Major: seven years. Tony Blair: ten years. Gordon Brown: three years. Cameron: five! Then: the madness. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak - four of them, squeezed into an eight-year window. This was when Britain succumbed to the Italian disease, unable to keep a political leader for more than two years.
Can we seriously be thinking of adding another two to that Cenotaph line-up: Keir Starmer and Ed Miliband? Or Angela Rayner? Repeat the Boris experiment by enlisting Andy Burnham, and have the country’s future decided by a demented by-election? I’m no big fan of Starmer and Labour deserves the pummelling it will be given in the local elections. But this regicidal reflex - Bad result! Change leader! New balls, please! - is itself a cancer that we have to overcome. So I have written my Times column today in defence of Starmer - and I make the case for keeping him in place.
The results of regicide have been calamitous. Each new leader arrives promising a reset, and each begins by junking what came before - only to discover that the underlying constraints remain. So the cycle repeats: disruption without delivery. The casualty is not just continuity but competence. Long-term problems are deferred, officials stop taking direction seriously, and ministers lose the time needed to master their briefs. This is how short-termism becomes structural: not a failure of will, but a system that prevents any government from governing for long enough to succeed.
They have now grown so much that governments can’t govern: a crisis of ‘state capacity’, the inability of elected leaders to deliver their promise. This inability translates into disillusion and then collapsing approval ratings on an ever-shorter cycle.
Social media has accelerated the crisis cycle. Starmer’s No10 is chaotic: we’ve seen that from the Olly Robbins debacle. But the remedy is to fix it, not junk him. I’d have more sympathy for the plotters if there was some super-competent figure waiting in the wings: but Miliband? Rayner? If they are the answer, what is the question? The leadership question is a choice, not a referendum. It is not “Can Starmer survive?” but “Would Labour - or Britain - be better off by junking yet another Prime Minister?” Or, even worse, Angela Rayner for 44 days before the bond markets go berserk and she has to get thrown out to make way for someone like Yvette Cooper. And that would be it: the Labour reenactment of the Passion of Boris would be complete.
Yes, I know Starmer’s limitations - I’ve written about them rather a lot. But rightly or wrongly, the voters gave him a rather large mandate not even two years ago. He has democratic legitimacy and in my view should be allowed to serve the term upon which he promised to serve. Any five-year stretch in No10 will bring difficult times. Thatcher had Westland (1985) unemployment hitting 3m (1981). Blair had Iraq and the cash-for-honours. Put anyone in No10 for long enough and they’ll have a scandal far worse than Olly Robbins tick-boxery. But PMs need to be given time to get through this. To recover; to learn. Those who win a majority also earn the right to ride out a few storms, and to be backed by the MPs they took into Westminster by their electoral success. As Shania Twain would say, you dance with the one who brung you. Labour MPs should do so now.
One of the most effective moves David Cameron made was not fire people all the time: so Iain Duncan Smith and Gove stayed put, rode through storms, managed to actually see through agendas. Why is welfare such a mess now? Because after IDS long tenure we ended up with Steve Crabb (4 months), Damian Green (11 months), David Gauke (7 months) Esther McVey (10 months) Amber Rudd (10 months) Thérèse Coffey (36 months) and Chloe Smith (2 months). Labour’s Liz Kendall crashed and burned; Pat McFadden is on month eight. This is a recipe for neglect with calamitous consequences for the country and society.
As a journalist, I ought not to complain: we’re commentators on a drama and mayhem is, as the saying goes, ‘good for trade’. But this madness is not good for the country or for confidence in democracy itself. We’re getting to the stage where voters will not believe they will actually get whoever they vote for. Everyone is weakened by this.
And let’s remember how delicate, how precarious our public finances are right now. I run a debt tab on the data library in my Substack and one of the charts is keeping an eye on how much of a premium UK gilts are to the rest. Just take a look at the below.
Britain used to be seen as a mid-risk country. Now we’re the riskiest of any advanced economy. More political instability will not help this. We don’t have room for a new radical Chancellor to be put in by a Polanski-terrorised Labour party and start messing about with borrowing, a la Truss. The UK is terrifyingly close to fiscal crisis.
Does Labour really want to push itself - and the rest of us - over that edge? Not content with the Mandelson debacle, does it want to disgrace itself with self-indulgent regicide and fiscal crisis as well? It may well be the party has altitude sickness; that its MPs are fundamentally not up to the discipline demanded by power. That they spent so long in Opposition demanding easy solutions that did not exist that they cannot understand why Starmer can’t bring them now. And that in a hissy fit they will further undermine their leader - demand a timetable for his departure, leave him bleeding, kid themselves into believing that things would be better with Angela Rayner, Miliband or whoever.
It’s not just that we have seen this movie before. It’s that we have spent ten years seeing nothing other than versions of this movie. Slips are magnified into scandal, ‘can the PM go on’ becomes the warcry - and MPs fool themselves into thinking that a new leader means a blank slate.
At times, it seems that a country that has banned foxhunting has now taken to PM-hunting as the new national bloodsport. But how will we look to the rest of the world if we sacrifice PM to the gods, as if in a prayer for competence? How will it look to a country that was exhausted by this madness under the Tories and will simply never forgive a Labour Party that takes 14 months to get as low as the Tories did in 14 years?
So yes, the May elections will be awful for Labour (and the Tories). Yes, Starmer lacks an agenda and is criminally wasting the opportunity that arrived with his landslide majority. But he won, nonetheless. He’s the PM. Deposing PMs should be a pleasure reserved for the voters. For the sake of the country and party, Starmer’s ministers should focus on making this project work - in spite of him, if needs be. Unless they are very sure that the alternative will be palpably better (as Sunak was after Truss) regicide is suicide. That was the lesson of the Tories. Labour still has time to learn it.
Thank you. It's about time someone said this!
Starmer is incapable of learning anything and will never do any better than he is now.