There are democracies that produce stable leadership and there is the United Kingdom, which has produced seven prime ministers in 10 years, beginning with David Cameron in 2016 and arriving today at Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester who Fox News describes as a “self-styled socialist” whose “ascension marks a dramatic leftward pivot for the country’s leadership,” which is a description of what happens when a country has cycled through seven prime ministers and decided to try something different.
Burnham, 56, the former Labour MP who served as Secretary of State for Health under Gordon Brown and who spent the past decade as Mayor of Greater Manchester developing a reputation as a pragmatic left-of-center administrator who actually made things work, succeeds a Conservative Party that has governed Britain since 2010, losing power in 2024’s general election to Keir Starmer, who subsequently resigned in June after a parliamentary confidence vote, producing Burnham’s emergence as leader of the Labour Party and, therefore, prime minister. Seven prime ministers in 10 years is the record that requires no further commentary except that it is seven prime ministers in 10 years.
The American equivalent would be having had Presidents Obama, Romney, Cruz, Clinton, Biden, Trump, and now a socialist mayor of Manchester all serve since 2016, which is not what has happened in the United States. The UK’s constitutional system allows changes of prime minister without a general election in certain circumstances, which is the mechanism that has produced the revolving door, and which Burnham will attempt to exit by being the leader who sticks. He is a socialist. He was a mayor. He is now running a country that has had seven prime ministers in 10 years and has just elected its first self-described socialist to lead it, which is either the beginning of a correction or the continuation of a pattern, and the country presumably intends to find out.
Fox News describes his ascension as “dramatic leftward pivot,” which is accurate in the sense that he has described himself as a socialist, and which requires noting that the country made this choice after 14 years of Conservative government, which is the context that “dramatic leftward pivot” does not include.
When a country has seven prime ministers in 10 years and the seventh one is a self-described socialist, what exactly is the country looking for?
Sources
HuffPost: Andy Burnham Becomes Britain’s 7th Prime Minister In A Decade After Starmer Resigns
