Six prime ministers in ten years, not one of them leaving on their own terms. Put to Professor Sir John Curtice that British politics may simply have become ungovernable, and he resists the tidy explanation. “If you could find a common thread that helped to explain these six resignations, then you might have a point,” he says. The honest truth, in his telling, is that most of the departures are particular to themselves.
He walks through them one by one. David Cameron went in 2016 because he lost the Brexit referendum and resigned straight away. Theresa May fell in 2019 because she could not get a Brexit deal through the House of Commons. But Boris Johnson in 2022, Curtice insists, “frankly has nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with the fact that Conservative MPs had finally concluded that Mr. Johnson’s “relationship with the truth was too loose and too unacceptable.” Liz Truss “spooked the markets” with her fiscal policies; Rishi Sunak didn’t resign on his own terms but “chose the date of the election that he lost.” By Prof Curtice’s reckoning, Brexit is the real driver in only “two and a half out of six”.
There is, though, a deeper current, one he traces back half a century. MPs, he argues, have grown steadily more assertive and less willing to follow the party line, a trend visible since the immigration rebellions under Edward Heath in the early 1970s.
Cameron was felled by a referendum and Sunak by the electorate, but Johnson and Truss were brought down by their own benches, and May by the divisions within hers. “It’s the greater assertiveness of MPs that is a common thread,” he says, and it makes the confidence of the Commons harder than ever for any prime minister to keep.
That assertiveness is what finally caught up with Keir Starmer. Curtice is blunt that the 2024 landslide was never as solid as it looked. The thumping majority, he says, was “everything to do with the electoral system and nothing to do with the level of electoral support that he got.” Labour won just 35% of the vote, “the lowest share of the vote that has ever been won by a majority government” in the UK.
Reform took a quarter of the 2019 Conservative vote, depressing the Tory tally seat after seat, and tactical voting did the rest, handing Labour close to a hundred seats more than it might otherwise have won, even as its own vote slipped in many constituencies it was defending. The result, as it has since become known, was “a rather loveless victory.”
Starmer was never popular, voters didn’t know what he stood for, and they wanted rid of the Conservatives more than they were embracing Labour. The weaknesses, Curtice says, were there in July for anyone willing to look past the 412 seats.
Starmer’s own failings sharpened the picture. Curtice points to a leader who “struggled always to come up with a narrative, a story about what his government was about,” and notes that, as Keir Starmer himself conceded, his party lost confidence in his ability to lead them past Reform at the next election.
Andy Burnham: The Next UK Prime Minister?
Which brings him to the man of the moment (almost). Is Andy Burnham the next British prime minister?
“I think there’s very little doubt about that,” Curtice says. After Burnham’s strong showing, Labour MPs are betting he can take the fight to Reform and, in doing so, “rescue their parliamentary careers” — many of them fearing they will otherwise lose their seats, and lose them to Reform of all parties. They are buying into Burnham as a more effective communicator and a far more popular figure than Starmer.
The gamble, Curtice cautions, is whether a successful mayor of Greater Manchester can manage the day-to-day grind of Downing Street – finding the policies that generate growth and turn around the health service. “It’s a kind of step up quite a few ladders,” he says.
He sees no surprise candidate emerging. Pressed on whether Labour might throw one up, as it has before, his answer is flat: “No, no, no. It’s Mr. Burnham.”
Wes Streeting, the one figure who might have made a fight of it, has done a deal with Burnham. Curtice expects no real contest and predicts that “by July the 17th, we’ll probably have a new Prime Minister.”
About Nigel Farage and Reform
The longer shadow belongs to Nigel Farage. For more than a year, one party has led every poll, and it is neither Labour nor the Conservatives. None of the major parties are genuinely popular, Curtice notes; Reform sits at just 27%, yet that is enough for a seven-point lead, and under first-past-the-post it could be “very difficult to stop Nigel Farage being Prime Minister.”
He, however, tempers it immediately: the next election is three years away, and “an awful lot of water has got to flow underneath an awful lot of bridges.” If Reform is to fall back, he argues, it likely happens only if the Conservatives, whose leader Kemi Badenoch is becoming “not unpopular” and who won a by-election against the polls last week, recover the ground they have bled to Farage. Labour, meanwhile, has been losing more votes to the Greens than to Reform, a nuance he says some Labour MPs still need to grasp.
Is any of this a uniquely British story? Curtice widens the lens for an international audience. Across the democracies of pre-1989 Western Europe – Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden – established parties have been upended; Italy’s old Christian Democrats and Communists have “more or less” disappeared. Britain, by contrast, “has kind of stood out as a beacon of stability.”
But “Brexit has unsettled an awful lot of politics,” he says, feeding the fragmentation now on display.
His final word is a refusal to predict. Farage may yet win; Labour and the Conservatives may yet recover. “None of us knows where Britain is heading politically,” Curtice says. “That’s what makes it interesting.” What is certain, he adds, is that both major parties have “a very, very substantial challenge on their hands.”