Some point to the pandemic and its aftermath: the inflation that cost incumbent governments elections across the world and tanked the popularity of those that followed. In Germany, the Starmer-like chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was dispatched from power last year only for the popularity of his replacement, the conservative Friedrich Merz, to collapse soon after. Britain, in this telling, is suffering from an intense strain of political long Covid.
A second explanation is that Britain continues to elect prime ministers who are utterly unsuited to the job. Theresa May, who became leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister soon after the Brexit referendum, was a serious politician who lacked the dexterity, nous and charisma to lead the country in the direction she believed was right. These deficiencies cost her the general election of 2017. Her successor, Boris Johnson, had the dexterity, nous and charisma but not the seriousness. Things only deteriorated from there. Liz Truss — who served just under 50 days — proved herself catastrophically ill-suited to power, sending markets spiraling in her first act as prime minister when she promised tax cuts Britain could not afford. That left her successor, the capable Rishi Sunak, with the almost impossible task to restore the Conservative Party’s fortunes.
Though he is the first Labour prime minister on this list, Mr. Starmer could be understood as just the latest in a long line of duffers. Like Ms. May and Mr. Sunak before him, he is a competent professional, but his flaws are, if anything, more pronounced. Mr. Starmer has never known what he wanted to do in the job. He did not arrive in government with a plan or a theory for why things had gone so badly wrong before him. As he told me in interviews for the New Statesman a little less than a year ago, he did not believe the country was in need of overhaul; the basics of the British state and its economy were broadly sound, he said. Britain just needed serious people committed to making serious decisions in the long-term national interest. Then investment would pour into the country, the economy would grow, living standards would recover and sanity would prevail. Mr. Starmer, in a fundamental sense, wanted to take the politics out of being prime minister. In an easier climate, this might have sufficed. Perhaps. But not today. Politics is king.
Britain’s troubles are deeper than post-pandemic blues and an unlucky run of leaders. Our current political volatility is a reflection of an economic and a geopolitical upheaval that has been playing out for almost 20 years. At the turn of the 21st century, Britain looked as if it had all the answers for the new world being born. It was in the European Union, but not its troubled single currency; close to the world’s only super power but less scarred than America by divisions of race and wealth. Britain had gotten the pain of deindustrialization out of the way early and was well placed to prosper as an English-speaking, open, liberal economy in the globalized world. The political project of Tony Blair, Britain’s Labour prime minister from 1997 to 2007, was built on those assumptions.
In 2008, a year after Mr. Blair’s retirement, the Blairite political economy collapsed. The City of London imploded, the banks were bailed out and the government deficit ballooned. In 2010, the Conservatives, with David Cameron as leader, were elected to balance Britain’s books. Mr. Cameron did not believe the economy needed radical reorientation, but when the global financial crisis metastasized into the Eurozone crisis and immigration from the continent increased, public consent for Britain’s membership in the European Union began to deteriorate. To protect Britain’s place in the bloc — and its economic model — Mr. Cameron gambled on an infamous referendum and lost. Over the course of eight years, Britain had watched both its political economy and its place in Europe blow up.
