Where are Britain’s capable leaders now?

The conduct of the great office of prime minister of the United Kingdom in the last 15 years has no precedent in the history of that position, which is generally deemed to have begun with Sir Robert Walpole at the beginning of his 21 years as PM starting in 1721. In the 14 years from 2010 to 2024, there were seven prime ministers, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Kier Starmer. Brown was honourably defeated after 13 years of Labour government between Tony Blair and himself. Cameron had a coalition government for five years, won a majority, promised “full-on treaty change,” with his usual effusion, from the EU, returned from Brussels with less than Mr Chamberlain brought back from Munich and resigned when he lost the Brexit referendum. Theresa May called an election to strengthen her hand in negotiating Brexit, lost her majority, defined leaving Europe as remaining within it while claiming to depart, and was dumped by her MPs. Boris Johnson executed Brexit, did well with Ukraine, but raised taxes, spent lavishly, irritated his MPs and was accused of hypocrisy in partying during Covid and his government resigned from under him. Liz Truss became prime minister, produced a brilliant Thatcherite budget that the self-destructive idiots of the Conservative Party rejected, and she was replaced after 45 days by Rishi Sunak, who was another left-wing Tory who took the bullet in 2024 for eight years of Tory incompetence under five consecutive leaders.

Such an astonishing and congested fiasco absolutely required a decisive defeat at the polls and the Conservative Dunciad was crushed, but not by the official Labour opposition, which only gained one per cent in the polls, but won an overwhelming parliamentary victory because of the defection of a very large number of Conservative voters to the populist-right Reform Party and the Liberal Democrats. The unthinkable has continued to gather strength: Support for the government has collapsed and support for the prime minister, Starmer, within the government benches has collapsed, while support for Reform has jolted upwards and there have been gains by the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and some of the provincial parties. A blending of recent polls has the Labour and Conservative parties each at just under 20 per cent, the Reform Party at just under 30 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats and Greens (who are redundant in almost all other advanced countries), at slightly under 15 per cent each. If such results were confirmed, it would produce a German style three-party coalition of ambiguous ideology. Never in British history have five different parties enjoyed more than 14 per cent electoral support at the same time. And the separatist Scots Nationalists have almost 40 per cent of the Scottish vote.

The Cameron government for its first five years was the only peacetime coalition government since the Earl of Aberdeen who left office 170 years ago and his ministry was in fact dominated by the faction heads, Palmerston as Home Secretary, Russell as Foreign Secretary, and Gladstone as Chancellor, who served between them eight times as prime minister. Ever since then, except for during the World Wars and immediately after World War I, one-party has managed to govern, even with a minority in Parliament, though King George V did from 1931 to 1935 ask the Conservative majority to support the former Labour prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, (who was sacked as leader of the Labour Party for agreeing to join and lead the National Government mainly composed of Conservatives and Liberals). For 80 years prior to 2015, of all major countries, the United Kingdom was legendarily and proverbially the most politically stable. The quality and competence of government certainly fluctuated but the immense prestige garnered by the British for their heroic performance under Winston Churchill in World War II produced for a time the levitation of the threadbare old Empire enjoying an apparent equality of status with the mighty United States and Stalin’s formidable Soviet Union.

The Gloriana of the Churchill legacy enabled Britain to make the most dignified and successful adjustment in the history of the nation state from the first rank of world powers to the second rank but principal ally of the greatest power, in its special relationship with the United States. Even when it suffered from economic stagnation, over-unionisation, and too many inefficient publicly-owned businesses and industries in the 70s, Britain was quickly revived to be the fourth most influential country in the world by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s.

The procession of conspicuous failures of five consecutive Conservative leaders between Brown and Starmer constitutes the near suicide of the great Tory party of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher. Now the Labour Party has fallen in with this inexplicable thirst for defeat and failure and the betting is even that Starmer will survive for another six months as prime minister before being given the high-jump by his own MPs.

This must be an aberration; British institutions, developed over 800 years since Magna Carta, have not suddenly become ineffective. And the British political class, though it is not at the moment overpopulated with Brobdingnagian statesmen, cannot suddenly have become a graveyard or a wasteland. But as long as the British political leadership is so feeble that no one appears capable of grappling with the need to manage immigration, reduce waiting lines in the health system, or restore significant economic growth, Britain cannot be considered a stable country and this compromises the political coherence of Europe and of the West in general. From Walpole to Thatcher, when Britain has needed capable leaders, it has found them. It is looking for one now.