There were times in which prime ministers seemed to be on their way as soon as they’d arrived. The big strategic decisions the country faced were ducked or postponed. The public finances repeatedly wobbled, yet efforts to rationalize the tax system faltered in the face of vested interests, including farmers. Reforms to social security were trumpeted before being diluted. The whole business of politics was animated by rancour and rivalry, rather than practical action. All the while, populists waited in the wings.
The Guardian reports that Keir Starmer did not go so gently, raging against the dying light until Andy Burnham’s victory in Makerfield forced him to accept the inevitable. Overseas precedents for British political tumult are all there is, because the country’s history can’t provide them. The has “never been a period like the present,” said Anthony Seldon, author of The Impossible Office?, which charts the 300-year story of the premiership.
There was a decade in each of the 18th (1760-1770) and 19th (1827-1837) centuries where Britain burned through prime ministers at a similar rate. But the six – and soon likely seven – PMs since 2016 rank as “unique” once we factor in the wider churn at the top. There have also been eight chancellors and nine foreign secretaries – before any post-Starmer reshuffle.
Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, and now, almost certainly, Burnham: cast your mind over the list and the first thought is not oof anything solid actually happening, just the simple fact of the frenzy. That is not a coincidence.
Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary, has seen three transitions “at close hand” : Thatcher to Major,, Blair to Brown and Brown to Cameron. In the “access talks” with the leader of the opposition before the 2010 election, David Cameron briefed him on the changes he would be asking for in Whitehall.
O’Donnell sounded world-weary as he recalled trying to sustain strategies for big issues through games of ministerial musical chairs. Pensions is one field that cries out for a long-term approach: individuals are meant to plan, save and accrue rights over the course of a lifetime. Whereas, O’Donnell recalls, at one stage there were “nine pension ministers over the course of five years”.
An obvious but underdiscussed consequence of changing prime minister is that a huge proportion of other ministers will automatically change too. Any new PM will, naturally wnt to shape their own cabinet, and no politician with the guile to reach the top of the greasy pole will be blind to the opportunities of using the junior ranks of government to reward loyalists and keep tricky customers under control.
And at the helm of the resulting team of novices will be an inexperienced leader – counselled by a new kitchen cabinet of advisers, mostly new to the workings of the centre of British power. As Cath Haddon of the Institute for Government thinktank acknowledges, there comes a point where personally ineffective PMs have to go.But she also worries about rendering the individual in the office ineffective by denying “the time needed to learn, govern and see projects through”. As “the conversion rate from prime ministers under pressure to prime ministers out of the door” increases, she sees the second part of that equation becoming “underpriced”.
The evasions embodied in Labour’s one-word manifesto title, Change, have unravelled but lessons have not been learned. The demand from all sides through this leadership crisis is: “faster and less incremental change”.
Excitable lobby reporters, and indeed the passionate party activists who get the final say on who becomes prime minister these days, sometimes forget that bg speeches do not in themselves alter much. Effective reforms become reality only after the drawing up of credible blueprints, the use of consultations to reaffirm principles and adjust for practicalities, the rewriting of laws, the securing and effective marshalling of resources.
