Why Britain devours its prime ministers
For much of the post-war era, Britain was known for prime ministers who lasted. Once a leader reached Downing Street, they were expected to stay
For much of the post-war era, Britain was known for prime ministers who lasted. Once a leader reached Downing Street, they were expected to stay there. The dominance of two established parties, relatively disciplined parliamentary blocs and a first-past-the-post electoral system that often turned votes into workable Commons majorities all helped give prime ministers a stable base. Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair both got something that now seems almost unimaginable: a decade in power. But British prime ministers are now coming and going in quick succession. The country is on course for its seventh prime minister in a decade. Theresa May and Boris Johnson each lasted just over three years. Liz Truss managed only 49 days. Keir Starmer was supposed to be different: he entered Downing Street after Labour won a landslide majority in 2024. Yet he, too, is now leaving after barely two years. Why has Britain’s famed stability given way so quickly to political chaos? There are several obvious explanations, but none is enough on its own. Has social media helped harden political divisions? Almost certainly. But Britain is hardly the only country with the internet. Has Brexit made the country harder to govern? Yes. It cut across party lines, deepened political identities and left prime ministers managing not just policy disputes but rival ideas of what the country should be. Yet, as academics have pointed out, Brexit did not create Britain’s instability out of nowhere. It accelerated pressures that were already building inside the political system. Could it simply be that Britain has had a run of bad leaders? As I like to remind my students, some people are just no good at the top job. For some recent prime ministers, the problem was competence. Theresa May could not get her Brexit deal through Parliament, while Liz Truss’s radical economic experiment collapsed almost as soon as it began.
For others, it was judgement and ethics. Boris Johnson broke the rules while asking the country to follow them, then damaged himself further by denying what had happened. Keir Starmer managed to blur the categories: his government was marked by policy indecision, but also by serious errors of judgement, most notably the appointment of Peter Mandelson. But bad leadership only takes us so far. Britain has had plenty of poor and failed politicians before. The deeper problem lies in the changing relationship between prime ministers and their own MPs. Any prime minister needs their parliamentary party to vote through their programme and defend them when trouble comes. For much of the post-war era, that relationship was more reliable. Since the 1970s, however, MPs have become more willing to rebel against their own parties, challenge their leaders and, when necessary, help remove them. To borrow the political scientist George Jones’s famous image, a prime minister’s power is like an elastic band. It can stretch, but only so far. The fraying relationship between MPs and prime ministers is behind many of the major events in British politics since the 1990s. Iraq badly damaged Blair’s authority with much of his own party. In 2003, so many Labour MPs rebelled against his Iraq policy that Blair and those around him feared it could cost him his premiership. The rebellion failed, but the war and its consequences drove a lasting wedge between Blair and many of his MPs. David Cameron held a Brexit referendum because his own rebellious MPs, long hostile to Europe, kept pushing the issue. When voters chose Leave, he resigned. Boris Johnson’s Partygate lies proved fatal when his own MPs refused to back him. Keir Starmer’s welfare cuts and harsh immigration policies forced his own Labour MPs to decide between loyalty and principle. This fraying has made MPs more willing to move against their leaders.
The BriefWire