I was in the Cambridge pub in Liverpool when the news showed Margaret Thatcher leaving Downing Street. She was being replaced by another Conservative, but we drank anyway. Not because the government had changed, but because an era had ended.
If I’d gone out drinking every time a prime minister left Downing Street over the last decade, I’d have spent most of it on an Oliver Reed-style bender.
We are likely to be on our seventh prime minister in little more than a decade very soon. Why do they keep failing?
Maybe we’ve simply had a poor run of leaders. Some lacked basic political skills. Some were temperamentally unsuited to the job. Some never really understood what the job involved. One was Liz Truss.
But I suspect there is something bigger going on.
A prime minister has resigned because his party won a by-election, not lost one . A British prime minister implicated in no great scandal has gone while an American president up to his neck in the Epstein files remains in office. Politics is increasingly detached from any rational measure of success or failure.
This isn’t normal.
It’s Not Just Starmer
Keir Starmer certainly had weaknesses.
His instinct was often to postpone difficult choices rather than make them. He frequently tried to delegate decisions involving trade-offs that only a prime minister can resolve. There was little sense of an overarching strategy beyond competent administration.
He entered Parliament relatively late and never had time to build the network of loyal MPs that successful political leaders usually cultivate. Much of the political operation was outsourced to Morgan McSweeney. Starmer was often more comfortable behaving like a senior barrister than a political leader.
There was also a deeper problem. Labour came into office promising managerial competence while badly underestimating how damaged the machinery of government had become, but ourteen years of Conservative ministers appointing loyalists, ideologues and mediocrities to senior positions had hollowed out parts of the British state. Wes Streeting was the only minister who fully grasped the scale of the problem. Too many departments simply carried on with the same failing structures and many of the same underperforming personnel.
If your political offer is competence, you need competent institutions to work with. Britain increasingly lacks them.
Yet Starmer’s shortcomings alone cannot explain what is happening. The same pattern can be seen across much of Europe.
Economic growth has been weak since the financial crisis. Housing has become less affordable. Public services are under strain. Rapid demographic and social change has unsettled many voters. These conditions have created fertile ground for ethnonationalist politics and anti-establishment movements.
Emmanuel Macron has survived as President for almost a decade, but France is on its seventh prime minister. Friedrich Merz became chancellor only recently and is already struggling with poor approval ratings. Across Europe, mainstream leaders are finding it harder to build stable governing coalitions while parties of the radical right continue to gain support.
These are not normal political conditions.
The Brexit Legacy
Britain has another problem.
Brexit normalised permanent crisis.
For years politics became a rolling drama in which every disagreement was treated as an existential confrontation. The media discovered that chaos generated audiences. Political parties discovered that replacing leaders was easier than solving problems. Voters became accustomed to the idea that changing the person at the top was itself a solution.
The result is a political culture with almost no patience.
Governments inherit problems that have taken decades to create and are expected to solve them within months. If they fail, the cry goes up for a new leader.
Parties have got into the habit of binning leaders at the first sign of trouble. Journalists who became addicted to the chaos of the Brexit years continue to search for the next dramatic downfall. The possibility that some problems are genuinely difficult and require sustained effort over many years barely enters the discussion. And few journalists or social media influencers have the kind of real world experience that would teach them that real change takes time.
This constant instability benefits certain interests. Some traditional media owners and social media platforms profit directly from outrage and political drama. Democracies that are permanently distracted by leadership contests are easier to manipulate than those focused on long-term policy.
The Age of the Magic Wand
Social media has also changed expectations.
It encourages people to believe that every problem has a simple solution if only the right politician would implement it. Complex issues involving trade-offs, costs and unintended consequences are compressed into slogans, memes and thirty-second videos.
Politics becomes a search for magic wands. Westminster Harry Potter.
Housing shortages can be solved instantly. Economic growth can be conjured into existence. Public services can improve overnight. Taxes can be cut while spending rises. Immigration can be reduced without affecting the economy. Every difficult choice supposedly has an easy answer.
Reality, unfortunately, refuses to cooperate.
Many of the problems facing Britain are the accumulated result of decisions, trends and failures stretching back decades. Solving them requires patience, compromise and persistence. None of those qualities perform particularly well on social media. Andy Burnham has a 10 year plan of nationalisation. He will be lucky if he still has people’s attention after 10 weeks.
The Limits of Government
There is another problem, one that receives far less attention.
People have lost faith in their own ability to solve problems.
As communities have fragmented and traditional institutions have weakened, fewer people feel capable of acting collectively outside the state. Trade unions are smaller. Churches are weaker. Local associations have declined. Many of the organisations that once connected people to one another have withered.
When something goes wrong, the instinct is increasingly to look towards Westminster.
Government is expected to solve everything.
Yet many of the issues people care about most — loneliness, community breakdown, lack of trust, social isolation, declining civic pride — cannot be fixed by ministers. Nor should they be.
A country that appears permanently furious with whoever occupies Downing Street may actually be unhappy about something much deeper. The anger is real. The target is misplaced.
An Impossible Job
Alongside these broader problems, there is something uniquely British about the role itself.
The office of prime minister evolved in a typically British fashion: gradually, accidentally and with very little thought about what the job should actually be.
There is no formal job description. No clear boundaries. Endless responsibilities but limited capacity.
The prime minister is expected to lead the government, manage the Cabinet, oversee the civil service, represent the country internationally, communicate with the public, respond to crises, keep the parliamentary party together and somehow find time to think strategically about the future.
It is too much for any one person.
Given the complexities of governing a polarised multi-party democracy with a struggling economy, it makes sense to make the role more manageable rather than less. Fortunately, there are few constitutional barriers to doing so.
Whoever replaces Starmer will improve their chances of survival by rethinking what it means to be prime minister. Because while some recent prime ministers have undoubtedly been poor, the deeper problem is that the job itself is becoming close to impossible.
The slogan of our age seems to be:
What do we want? Everything.
When do we want it? Now.
Who do we want to pay for it?
Someone else.