“Are we the Italians?” was the best British politics meme I’ve seen for a while. (If you missed “Are we the baddies?,” I can’t help you. Do keep up.)
If Sir Keir Starmer is driven from 10 Downing Street by (among other things) the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it will bring the total number of prime ministers Britain has had in the past 10 years to seven (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Starmer).
That is certainly reminiscent of Italian politics in the second half of the 20th century. The Italians had seven prime ministers in 10 years not once but twice: in the 1950s and the 1990s. (I won’t list them all; life’s too short. The only name you’d recognize would be Silvio Berlusconi.) But the resemblance is superficial. British politics is much funnier than Italian politics has ever been. It is also much more British to behave this way than most Americans realize.
