On Monday, British prime minister Keir Starmer announced his resignation after less than two years in office. The decision means his successor, expected to take office within a few weeks, will become Britain’s seventh prime minister in just 10 years. (For an in-depth look at Starmer’s tenure, read Douglas Murray’s piece also in our pages today.)
But what exactly has made Britain so difficult to lead—and is it possible that the country is simply ungovernable? The timing of Starmer’s announcement is notable. This week marks the 10th anniversary of Brexit, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. And in the years since, political instability has been one of the few constants in British public life. Against this backdrop, we turn today to historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, for the long view on how Britain arrived at this moment. —The Editors
In my late 20s, as a newcomer to the history faculty at the University of Cambridge, I came under the bracingly baleful influence of that most acerbic of Tory historians, Maurice Cowling. He taught me to understand English history as a succession of challenges to the established religious and social order, which the Conservative Party existed to contend with, and ultimately, to contain.
Democracy, in the form of electoral reform; socialism, in the form of the Labour Party; and fascism, in the form of Hitler—each of these challenges, Cowling argued in three ironic and contrarian books (1867, The Impact of Labour 1920–1924, and The Impact of Hitler), required all the guile of the political elite to withstand. For Cowling, politics was not really about ideologies or personalities, as it might appear to the naive onlooker. It was about the maintenance of power and the allocation of high office within the elite.
As someone whose guiding light was an unholy trinity of “irony, geniality, and malice,” Cowling, who died in 2005, would greatly have enjoyed the madcap high politics of Britain’s past decade, which has now seen an astonishing seven prime ministers depart prematurely from No. 10 Downing Street. But it would have saddened him to reflect that Europe had succeeded where democracy, socialism, and fascism had all failed—by bringing the Conservative Party to the brink of political oblivion. The sole consolation would have been that it has done the very same thing to the Labour Party.
Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of Brexit, the referendum on British membership of the European Union. It is also the day after the admission by yet another party leader, Keir Starmer, that the game is up, and someone else must ascend what the Victorian Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli memorably called “the greasy pole” to occupy the post of prime minister.
