According to the Observer, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is poised to throw in the towel as early as Monday, potentially turning his weekend retreat at Chequers into a full-blown wake for his premiership. His position has been on life support for months, but the final nail in the coffin appears to have been hammered in by Andy Burnham’s thumping victory in the Makerfield by-election, which has conveniently cleared the path for a leadership challenge.
At 56, Burnham has been quietly anointed by a significant chunk of the Labour Party as the heir presumptive. Having cultivated a formidable political base as the Mayor of Greater Manchester, he effortlessly dispatched Nigel Farage’s candidate in the by-election, proving he can still pull a crowd in the North. While Burnham hasn’t formally drawn his sword against Starmer, his victory speech had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, promising a “new path” for the nation – a phrase that sounds suspiciously like a job application.
On Friday, a defiant Starmer was still vowing to fight any coup attempt and pleading with his party to stop its self-destructive infighting. It seems the pleas fell on deaf ears. The Observer claims the decision to resign was made after a cosy weekend chat with his wife at Chequers, a conversation that presumably began with “Dear, we need to talk about the future” and ended with “…and the severance package.”
If Starmer does jump, he’ll be joining an exclusive club: the UK will have its seventh Prime Minister in just over a decade. This level of churn hasn’t been seen since the early 1920s, a period that saw a revolving door of premiers from Lloyd George to Ramsay MacDonald. One might say the country has gone from a stable democracy to a political version of musical chairs, where the music stops and the incumbents are politely, or not so politely, shoved out the door. It’s a record-breaking rate of turnover that makes Italian governments look like models of stability.
