On the Fourth of July Americans will celebrate their country’s semiquincentennial, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm as they contrast the founders of the republic with their present-day successors. For Sir Keir Starmer, July 4 will also bring mixed feelings. It will be two years to the day since he led the Labour Party to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election, winning 411 of 650 parliamentary seats, while the Conservatives, who had been in office for fourteen years, collapsed, winning only 121. As I observed then, the scale of the Labour victory was deceptive: Starmer gained that huge majority with barely 34 percent of the popular vote. Since the turnout was just below 60 percent—a sharp fall from 67 percent at the previous election in December 2019—that meant only about one British elector in five had voted Labour.1
Even so, few of us guessed just how tenuous Starmer’s position would prove or how quickly his authority would shrivel. For more than a year now, voting-intention polls have found that support for Labour is below 25 percent, and Starmer’s approval ratings have been at rock bottom. That was confirmed on May 7 when local elections were held in many parts of England, as were elections for the devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales. In the English elections Labour lost 1,498 council seats and won only 17 percent of the vote, the same as the Conservatives.
For much of the past hundred years Labour has been the largest party in Scotland and has dominated Wales politically. The devolved administrations unenthusiastically created by the Blair government were designed to help Labour by marginalizing the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, and Labour had indeed controlled the Welsh assembly since its creation in 1999. But in May it was defeated by the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, and in Scotland it was seen off by the Scottish National Party. Over the past forty years or so, in a turn of phrase not sufficiently commented on, politicians and journalists and many others have taken to calling this country “the UK.” It used to be called “Britain” and before that “England,” the name that both Gladstone and Disraeli used, even when speaking in Scotland. It’s an odd irony that the initials of the United Kingdom have caught on just when the kingdom is less united than ever, and may even be falling apart.
Most startling of all in May was the success of Reform UK, which didn’t exist by that name five years ago. It gained 26 percent of the vote in England, well ahead of any other party, won 1,454 council seats, took control of councils in old Labour heartlands in the north such as Gateshead, Barnsley, Sunderland, and Wakefield, and ran second in Scotland and Wales. Reform is the latest iteration of the parties led for twenty years by Nigel Farage: the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) until 2019, then briefly the Brexit Party, then Reform UK, all motivated by hostility to the European Union and to immigration. Farage can claim to have been in some ways the most successful or at least the most influential figure in British political life since he appeared on the scene.
Maybe this should have been foreseeable. In the 2015 general election a parliamentary majority was won by the Conservatives led by David Cameron—to widespread surprise, including his own. Writing about that election I noted the significance of what was then UKIP. It won only one seat, but took more than 12 percent of the vote, and whereas in the previous election in 2010 it had not run second in any constituency, in 2015 it did so in no fewer than 120, forty-four of which were won by Labour.2 This was a portent whose significance I didn’t fully grasp at the time. It should have been the clue to the referendum held a year later, when the British people—or more accurately the people of large parts of England, in many of which UKIP had surged, and which Reform now dominates—voted to leave the European Union.
Having lost much of the working class to Faragism, Labour is now losing much of the educated middle class, not only to the Liberal Democrats but to another party that barely existed twenty years ago. Led by the unlikely figure of Zack Polanski, the Greens came almost out of nowhere to take 18 percent of the vote in the local elections. And so while the Tories are being outflanked on the right by Reform, Labour is being outflanked on the left by the Greens, and the two-party system that had for so long seemed a fact of life is dissolving before our eyes.
In his response to the elections Starmer was bewildered, tone-deaf, and painful to behold. He insisted that he wasn’t quitting, announced that he was bringing back the former prime minister Gordon Brown and the former party chair Harriet Harman—two blasts from the past whose names mean nothing to younger people and produce derisive chuckles from those who do remember them—to bolster his team, and, even more absurdly, told an interviewer that he wanted to spend a decade in Downing Street. And then he gave a speech that was meant to relaunch, or maybe save, his career, but that was more wooden than ever, and simply embarrassing: “My mum and dad, Rod and Jo, didn’t have material things. But they had this deep comfort inside that they had contributed to a country that had left something better for those that came after them.” Oh dear.
Six days after the elections, the pageantry of the King’s Speech announcing the government legislative program was upstaged shortly after 8:00 AM by reports that Wes Streeting, the ambitious health secretary who had made no secret of his dissatisfaction with Starmer, had just met him at Downing Street. In the British Army “an interview without coffee” means that a subaltern has been bawled out by his commanding officer, but on this occasion there can scarcely have been time for a cup of coffee anyway, since Streeting left after a matter of minutes and the next day announced his resignation in a scathing letter.
Then Starmer was threatened from another flank. Andy Burnham is regarded by some Labour people as the man who might restore the party’s fortunes. He was an MP for a Manchester constituency from 2001 to 2017 and served as a cabinet minister in Brown’s government of 2007–2010, which was thrown completely off course by the financial crash of 2008. When Brown lost the 2010 election and resigned as party leader, Burnham was a candidate to succeed him but came in fourth out of five behind the winner, Ed Miliband. He tried again when Miliband resigned after losing the 2015 election, but he lost to the veteran left-winger and long-shot outsider Jeremy Corbyn, who became a kind of craze as young people discovered that they could join the Labour Party for the price of a pint of beer and vote for him.
So Burnham left Westminster and was elected mayor of Greater Manchester, winning reelection twice, although on very low turnouts—barely a third of eligible voters. After his last reelection two years ago it was understood that he would stay in Manchester at least until 2028, but that’s now been quietly forgotten. His reputation is something of a puzzle. Manchester has seen a degree of economic growth, at least by the modest standards of the rest of the country, and Burnham has improved bus and train services, but his appeal at present seems to be based less on what he is or has done than on the fact that he’s not Starmer.
Before he does challenge Starmer, Burnham must return to Parliament. And so Josh Simons helpfully announced that he was resigning as Labour MP for Makerfield, a constituency near Manchester, and Burnham has now been chosen as the Labour candidate in the consequent by-election. Burnham should know that there is an ominous precedent. Before the 1964 general election, Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, designated Patrick Gordon Walker, a sometime Oxford don and a long-serving Labour MP, as the foreign secretary in the government he hoped to form. Labour narrowly won the election, but Walker lost his seat at Smethwick on the edge of Birmingham. Wilson nevertheless appointed him while he looked for another constituency, but in the arranged by-election at Leyton he was again defeated. Voters don’t like being taken for granted, and they resent being used for a fix. Moreover, at the local elections in May, Reform won every ward in Makerfield, and it has promised to throw everything it can at Burnham in the by-election. His return to Westminster is not a foregone conclusion.
Although scores of Labour MPs have said that Starmer should depart, it is by no means easy to depose a sitting prime minister. An MP must challenge him and be supported by 20 percent of Labour MPs (which means at present eighty-one), whereupon others can enter the contest. Burnham should remember that no Labour prime minister and only one Conservative has ever been removed from office involuntarily, although that doen’t make Starmer’s position more secure. Not long after that historic fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, I was talking to Enoch Powell, the veteran oracle of the Tory right. “It’s simple, really,” he said. “A prime minister who loses the support of her Cabinet cannot continue,” and indeed by now it’s clear that Starmer no longer enjoys the support of many of his ministers, some of whom are privately urging him to set a date for a dignified departure.
In part these latest elections were a personal, and extremely negative, verdict on Starmer, confirming, as every poll and doorstep visit has found, that he’s actively disliked with a vehemence that is not entirely easy to understand, and almost disturbing, when we hear soccer fans chanting “Keir Starmer is a wanker.” To be sure, no one could say that his premiership has been much of a success, marked as it has been by continual misjudgments and reversals. “Leaders take responsibility, but too often that has meant other people falling on their swords,” Streeting wrote in his resignation letter, and it’s true that Starmer has sacked one person after another as things have gone awry. Sue Gray, his chief of staff, Sir Oliver Robbins, the head of the Foreign Office, and Morgan McSweeney, the mysterious Irishman who was Starmer’s closest aide, have been only the most prominent casualties. No doubt some of his woes have been beyond his control—the consequences of Donald Trump’s misbegotten war on Iran have been disastrous for the British economy, which was shaky enough already—but some have been self-inflicted. That includes measures introduced by Rachel Reeves, the first female chancellor of the exchequer (and very much not one of the potential candidates to succeed him), such as raising taxes on employers, which seemed almost designed to increase unemployment. And then there was his appointment of an ambassador to Washington.
Well now. In November 2005 there was a wonderful moment in the House of Commons. Four years earlier Conservative Party members had inflicted Iain Duncan Smith as party leader on their MPs, but within two years he proved so useless that he was deposed and replaced by the clever and guileful Michael Howard. He led the party through the 2005 election, when it began to recover some ground and Blair gained his third parliamentary majority, albeit with barely 36 percent of the popular vote. Then, having helped ensure the succession of his protégé, David Cameron, Howard appeared at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons for the final time that November. For his very last question as Leader of the Opposition he asked, with the straightest of faces, “The prime minister once said, ‘My project will be complete when the Labour Party learns to love Peter Mandelson.’ Can he give us a progress report on that?” The House was convulsed with laughter, and again when Blair replied, “I might have to say on that one, a lot done, a lot left to do.” Alas, it never was done, and it was always a hopeless task.
Forty years have passed since Mandelson first moved like a shadow through Labour politics, first as a backstairs apparatchik and then as Blair’s consigliere in creating New Labour. In case anyone failed to grasp what that name meant, just before Blair’s triumph at the 1997 election there was a very funny book review in The Spectator by the late Robert Taylor, a Financial Times correspondent and a man of the left (not such an unusual combination as one might think). The book was The State to Come by Will Hutton, a cheerleader for Blair and New Labour, who predicted “a strange rebirth of liberal England,” with greater public spending paid for by higher taxes on the rich, strengthened unions, a closer engagement with Europe beginning with an immediate process to join the single currency when it was created, and many beguiling things besides.
Could Hutton really believe this nonsense, Taylor asked? How the
young spin doctors in Millbank Tower [Labour headquarters] must be laughing among themselves at such patent absurdity. They know from their own focus group findings that what Middle England really, really wants is Thatcherism with a fresh young face and this is what Mr Blair provides.
No one played a larger part in creating that neo-Thatcherite party than Mandelson. In his least forgotten utterance, he said that New Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich,” and both he and Blair, consigliere and capo, have done their best to put that maxim into practice. That was part of Mandelson’s undoing, as he was over and again to be found enjoying the company of the very rich, whether aboard the yacht of a Russian “oligarch” (that curious expression we use for crooked billionaires) or schmoozing rich Americans.
To make an unusual disclosure, I quite like Peter Mandelson. That’s not something you’ll hear today on all sides, if indeed any. In conversation he’s what you would expect: smart, quick, catty, amusing. He is a highly competent administrator but a clumsy intriguer, undone by ambition and his own defects. Much as he wanted a final job, and lobbied hard for the Washington embassy, where there was already a perfectly good ambassador, he was always an accident waiting to happen. And so, having arrived in Washington in February 2025, he was sacked in September as more details of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein emerged.
But Starmer came out of the episode worse than Mandelson. He has been blusteringly evasive when asked what and when he knew about that friendship, and a parliamentary committee has severely censured him for withholding information about the appointment. It was already known that Mandelson had stayed in Epstein’s New York apartment while its owner was in prison for sexual offenses with minors, which should have been the end of the matter, and it was ignoble of Starmer to say that “Mandelson lied to me,” which merely prompts the obvious question of why he believed him.
The deeper answer to that is even more deplorable: Starmer was keen to send Mandelson to Washington because he believed he could ingratiate himself with Trump. That was at once cynical and foolishly unobservant, since anyone should have noticed by now that you can lick Trump’s boots and he’ll still kick you in the teeth. It was all of a piece with the worst single moment of Starmer’s premiership, when he sat in the Oval Office in February 2025 and obsequiously produced an envelope with a personal invitation from King Charles III to Trump to come to England for another state visit.
After that excruciating scene Trump did come, and the entire event was utterly farcical. He longed to ride in a golden coach along the Mall while cheered by the populace, but he’s so disliked in London that there would have been jeers, not cheers. And so the visit effectively took place in private: Windsor was sealed off from the public and a Potemkin military parade was put on for the president’s delectation. Since then Trump has insultingly raged against Starmer, most recently for failing sufficiently to support his Iran adventure, which the prime minister wasn’t consulted about and didn’t want any part of. Now we’ve just learned of an internal Pentagon memo that suggests a “review” of the British claim to the Falkland Islands. But really, if one good thing comes out of these events it would be that the ridiculous expression “special relationship” is dead and buried forever.
It’s tempting to say that comparing Nigel Farage with Zack Polanski is to see the difference between a mountebank and a charlatan. Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times says that Farage “is about as good a politician as he ever will be (which is very good indeed),” but that’s wrong. Farage isn’t really a politician at all. He might be thought a formidable demagogue, but he’s no parliamentarian. He has only been an MP for two years and is rarely to be seen in the House of Commons. He also has his own knack for reversing himself. Farage used to boast of his friendship with Trump, but he has gone very quiet on the subject as he realizes how little good it does him.
In 2014 I had lunch with Farage while writing an article about him and UKIP for The New York Times Magazine. We met at his suggestion at Boisdale, a restaurant near Westminster much favored by right-wingers. When I arrived I was told that he was upstairs on the smoking deck caballing with party cronies. He finally descended, and we had a perfectly pleasant conversation over lunch. He’s affable and almost persuasive if you don’t look too hard or ask difficult questions. Only later did I scrutinize my bill for the lunch and see that I’d also paid for the drinks with his cronies.
That was a very small matter compared with the private £5 million gift Farage received from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency billionaire who lives in Thailand (one sometimes feels that one is writing things that might be implausible in a satirical novel), just before he ran in the 2024 election. Farage claimed the money was specifically for his personal security but later said that it was “given to me as a reward” for campaigning for Brexit, and that either way there was no need for him to declare it. Should Starmer want to do one truly good deed before he leaves, he could reform political funding by ending corporate donations, from both companies and unions, and limiting individual donations to £5,000 a year, from British citizens, residents, and taxpayers.
If Farage is a chancer, then Polanski is a clown. He was born David Paulden to a Jewish family, but when he was eighteen he reverted to an older family name. He has had various careers and among other earlier avocations used to claim that he could enlarge women’s breasts by hypnotism. He joined the Liberal Democrats and only ten years ago was one of their candidates in local elections before he switched over to the Greens. Once a romantic conservationist party, their policies are now a ragbag ranging from free university education to legalization of drugs, but they’ve also picked up another cause.
A curiosity of British politics is how large a part has been played by “what is, somewhat oddly, called the Middle East,” as Winston Churchill once put it. From the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, foreign policy was much concerned with “the Eastern Question,” meaning the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, whose consequences are with us still. In 1915 Churchill’s career was derailed by his advocacy for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, and by 1917 a British army was fighting its way through Gaza to Jerusalem the year the government issued the Balfour Declaration favoring a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Then in 1922 the fall of David Lloyd George’s government was precipitated by the Chanak crisis on the other side of the Dardanelles from Gallipoli. And in 1956 the Suez debacle brought Sir Anthony Eden’s prime ministership to an end.
A much more recent episode is less well understood. Twenty years ago Israel invaded Lebanon, provoking worldwide condemnation. Or rather, global opinion in 2006 was divided: as one cabinet minister said later, “There were only three countries in the world against a ceasefire. Israel was one. The United States was another. And we were the third. People were nauseated.” Blair’s refusal to budge from supporting Israel and President Bush was the last straw for Labour ministers and MPs. Blair had supposed that he would remain in Downing Street until the next election in 2009, but he agreed to go quietly in 2007.
Only a few years ago, few imagined that the name “Gaza” would again become so highly charged in British politics: we saw the first sign in 2024 when four Muslim candidates were elected to Parliament as independents, with one of them saying “This is for the people of Gaza.” Now the Greens have added Gaza to their list of causes. Lately there have been huge marches in London on weekends, some in support of Palestine and others in support of Israel, and on May 16 there was a large demonstration led by “Tommy Robinson,” a racist, Muslim-bashing rabble-rouser whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon. Amid this inflamed atmosphere there has been a horrific rash of violent attacks on synagogues and individual Jews.
Meanwhile another anniversary approaches, and another shadow hangs over all recent quarrels between and within parties. On June 23 it will be ten years since the fateful referendum in which the British people voted to leave the European Union. Today we can say without hesitation that Brexit has been a disaster. This is not a partisan point. Brexit has been like a bad divorce that leaves everyone unhappy. Polls find a consistent majority regretting Brexit, while those who voted Remain are still dismayed by the shamelessly demagogic Leave campaign.
But then those who voted Leave feel cheated because they’ve seen none of their promised benefits. The referendum was more than anything a vote against uncontrolled immigration, but after Boris Johnson, the most prominent Leaver, if also the most unprincipled, became prime minister, immigration increased threefold during the years he was in office, and in the past eight years more than 200,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats. Although Streeting isn’t going to win a Labour leadership contest, he has broken a taboo by saying clearly that Great Britain should try to rejoin the European Union. In turn he’s been denounced by his erstwhile cabinet colleague Lisa Nandy for rocking the boat. As Burnham knows, Makerfield voted 65 percent in favor of Leave ten years ago, and having said last year that he favored rejoining, he now shies away from that thorny question.
Both Burnham and the Greens have returned to another question by saying that they favor electoral reform or proportional representation. For progressives this has been a holy grail, or maybe will-o’-the-wisp, for many years, although this is an awkward time to raise it. It’s a commonplace to say that the country has become ungovernable, but what would happen if membership of the House of Commons reflected the results of the recent local elections? Reform might end up with a quarter of parliamentary seats, but with whom would it govern in coalition? Or what other coalitions could be formed? Could anyone even pretend to govern the country?
With all of this there is an unquantifiable but unmistakable national mood of despondency, painfully reflected in sports. The England cricket team was routed in Australia over the winter, in the spring international competition the England rugby team managed to win one game out of five, and only the most optimistic can really imagine the England soccer team winning the World Cup in July. Less frivolously, amid that despondency Starmer’s supporters say that a leadership contest will cause economic instability, but then instability is here anyway.
They can also point to the paucity of talent among his rivals. It’s a besetting temptation to play laudator temporis acti, pining for the good old days, but sometimes the old days really were good. Look back fifty years. Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister and Labour leader in March 1976. In those happier times his successor was chosen by the Labour MPs rather than, as now, by people who have joined the party and immediately become entitled to vote for a leader. The candidates to succeed him were Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Denis Healey, Anthony Crosland, and James Callaghan, who was elected and became prime minister. All apart from Foot had served in the war: Callaghan in the Royal Navy, Benn in the Royal Air Force, the others in the army; Healey and Crosland had seen action as junior officers; Jenkins had worked at the Bletchley Park code-breaking center. He, Foot, and Crosland wrote books of considerable value. Looking back, they seem a race of giants.
And today? If Burnham doesn’t win in Makerfield it will raise questions about his future, if he does win it will raise questions about Starmer’s future, and in any case there’s a larger question as to whether the Labour Party itself has any future. Surveying the possible contenders—Burnham, Streeting, Ed Miliband, the former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, Starmer himself if he doesn’t throw in the towel—one can only sigh. The Guardian quotes one Labour MP saying, “We have to face up to the fact that every single one of them is fucking useless.” That’s perhaps a little blunt, but it does seem that although the country is full of clever, gifted, energetic people, not least young people, they don’t go into politics anymore. And that’s a problem for all of us.
—May 27, 2026
English (US) · 