A tough inheritance awaits Keir Starmer’s successor

With Keir Starmer announcing his intention to resign, Britain is set to get its seventh prime minister in a decade. Coming in the midst of a political realignment, as a two-party system fragments into a five-party one, this raises a question: Is Britain ungovernable? On the one hand, there is Starmer’s record in office, which has included a slew of policy U-turns and a pivot to the right that has alienated much of Labour’s traditional base. On the other hand, there are structural factors, such as the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis and Brexit, and the long-term erosion of state capacity, that any PM might have struggled with. But beyond these lies declining public trust in, and heightened scrutiny of, the political class — doubtless exacerbated by Starmer’s own failures such as the Peter Mandelson scandal — which has forced a prime minister out of office just two years after he was elected with a historic majority. That is the circle Starmer’s successor will have to square: To regain the trust of a public deeply divided over issues ranging from immigration, where resentment has boiled over into race riots, to welfare. And to do what Starmer consistently failed to do: Communicate a positive narrative of genuine achievements in governance — neither a sharp fall in net migration nor hitting a key target for NHS waiting times saved the PM. If former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, whose byelection victory triggered Starmer’s exit, becomes Labour leader and PM, he will be significantly more popular than Starmer, opinion polls show. He will need to harness that goodwill to restore some measure of political stability and stem the ethnonationalist tide. On the world stage, Starmer had been agile in dealing with Donald Trump and negotiated a trade deal with the US, but relations soured amid the war on Iran. His successor will have to navigate that volatile relationship as well as ties with Europe, both of which will be expecting Britain to maintain its security commitments — Defence Secretary John Healey’s resignation this month over insufficient funding will be a matter of concern for the next PM. Above all, Starmer’s successor will need to articulate a larger national vision of a diverse 21st-century Britain and its place in the world.