The same failed policies have broken six prime ministers. Can Burnham break the mould?

The British political system is tossing aside used prime ministers faster than a chain-smoker stubs out cigarette butts.

Andy Burnham is the seventh prime minister in the decade since David Cameron was in 10 Downing Street. Of those seven only two - Cameron and Keir Starmer - first became prime minister in the traditional manner of winning a general election as the head of their party.

The majority of prime ministers in the last 10 years - Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Burnham - were first thrust into the top job by the party machines without the electorate being asked to pass judgment, although Johnson did subsequently win at the polls. May only managed a hung parliament in 2017 and depended on Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party votes to govern.

The average time in office is two years, compared to the post-war average of four and a half years, or a full parliamentary term. Admittedly recent averages are dragged down by Liz Truss’s lettuce-adjacent performance of 49 days, but even Johnson, the longest serving PM of the last decade, only managed to stay in post for just over three years.

There is an even sharper way to show the new bucking bronco instability: Britain had only five prime ministers during the 36 years from 1979 to 2015 (Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Cameron, who entered office in 2010). By contrast, it had five different prime ministers in the 10 years since 13 July 2016 when May replaced Cameron after the Brexit vote.

This process corrodes the political system. When a UK prime minister takes office mid-parliament without a general election, polling has often shown that more voters want an election than oppose one.

When Sunak took over in October 2022, YouGov asked directly whether he should call an early general election. Some 56 percent said yes, and only 29 percent said no.

When Truss’s premiership wilted and another Tory prime minister was about to be selected without a general election, 60 percent of Britons said they wanted a general election.

Burnham faces the same lack of legitimacy. Some 57 percent of voters currently say they are uneasy with prime ministers taking office without a direct electoral mandate.

Underlying fragility

So why is the British political system becoming so dislocated? The fate of Starmer’s prime ministership gives us some clear indications.

Starmer could not have had a fairer wind when he entered office. He had slain the dragon of Corbynism and quieted its remnants while simultaneously presenting himself as the sensible continuity candidate that the moderate social democrats could back. The Labour Party was about as united as it ever gets.

Starmer then won a massive majority of seats in the 2024 election, which should have freed him from any need to bend before backbench pressure, or, indeed, pressure from the opposition in the Commons.

But Starmer’s majority was deceptive because the peculiarities of the electoral system gave him a landslide in Commons seats which was not underpinned by a landslide in the popular vote, which was in fact lower than the vote that Corbyn got when he lost the 2019 election.

Careless of this fragility, Starmer immediately launched a series of deeply unpopular austerity measures including limitations on the Universal Credit health top-up, limiting access to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) for new claimants, and restricting the winter fuel allowance.

On top of these unpopular domestic policies, Starmer then launched into a full-throated support for the state of Israel when it invaded Gaza in October 2023. That turned out to be so unpopular that Burnham has had to apologise publicly for the stance on the very eve of becoming prime minister simply to try and avoid the stain of it marking his entry into Number 10.

So, in short, Starmer fell because his adherence to neoliberal economic orthodoxy at home and western imperial interests abroad destroyed his premiership. Those views are broadly rejected by electors, especially those likely to vote Labour.

Starmer misread the electorate, assuming that the only threat was from Nigel Farage's Reform party and the populist right when there was in fact a sizeable discontented minority of left-of-centre votes, visible in the election of the Gaza independents and in the Green surge.

Starmer even misunderstood the nature of the Reform vote, believing it could only be dealt with by accommodation on the issue of refugees and asylum seekers, when in fact many Reform voters could be won back to Labour if the party presented itself as a serious anti-establishment force willing to challenge economic orthodoxy and US-dominated foreign policy.

Neoliberalism obsession

The truth is that the fundamental reason for the dislocation of the British political system is that the majority of the population know from a generation of experience that the neoliberal free market model has failed and that "Britain is broken" as a result of the establishment’s obsession with this model since the time of Thatcher. And they also know that every foreign policy decision since 9/11 has been a costly failure.

Here’s just one example of this radicalisation. In 1985, 59 percent of voters said controlling prices was a government responsibility. By 2006, after two decades in which market-oriented economics had become dominant, that had fallen to 31 percent.

The fundamental reason for the dislocation of the British political system is that the majority of the population know from experience that the neoliberal free market model has failed

It subsequently reversed dramatically: 68 percent now say it is definitely a government responsibility.

There is a similar shift the question of inequality. The proportion saying government should reduce income differences went from 45 percent in 1985, down to 25 percent in 2006, before rising again to 53 percent following the financial crisis, the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

Attitudes to US-led foreign policy shifted first over the Afghan and Iraq wars, moved in the establishment’s direction over Ukraine, but are now more hostile than ever. In March 2026, YouGov found 68 percent of Britons believed the United States was having a negative impact on the world, up from 57 percent only two months earlier. Among Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green voters, 83–89 percent regarded America’s global impact negatively. Even Reform voters were roughly divided.

All this underlines a stark and enduring truth. Britain’s political system will remain dysfunctional and prime ministers will continue to have a short lifespan so long as the establishment continues to force on an unwilling populace an economic system and an international order which frustrates their deep-felt sense that the society must be radically changed to meet their most basic needs.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.