John Oxley: Are we in a new phase for all Prime Ministers? The era of ‘two year Keir’

John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.

While the Starmer project limps on from crisis to scandal, the Prime Minister’s days as Labour leader seem numbered.

His cabinet might still be behind him, but given the prospect of bruising local elections, he seems more useful to them as a human shield than as a PM.

Starmer’s route to political survival is narrow and requires a level of good judgment that has so far eluded him. Few would bet on the PM being in place by the end of the year; fewer still would bet on seeing out his term.  His eventual defenestration will emphasise a new trend in British politics: the short tenure of top officeholders.

If Starmer goes over the summer, there’s a chance he will have served less time in Number 10 than Rishi Sunak. Should he fall by mid-July, we will have had 7 Prime Ministers in a decade, counting from the last days of the Cameron ministry. This would be a record unseen since the 1820s and the tumultuous days of the Reform Act, Catholic emancipation, and the Corn Laws. Even if one ignores the precise dates and records, it represents a significant change in modern British politics.

Since the fall of Cameron, no Prime Minister has completed a full electoral term. Each of his successors has run out of political road before then. Most have been done in by their own party when their political capital was exhausted. Only Rishi Sunak was ousted by the public. Perhaps even more remarkably, Edward Heath was the last Prime Minister to enter and exit Downing Street via an election. It appears that two or three years of leadership is becoming the new norm.

Plenty has been written about why that is.

The more generous assessments point to the difficulties of running modern Britain, a country where growth has stalled, demography is placing greater demands on the state, and there are few politically easy answers. Others have pointed to lacklustre politicians. For each of the names in the last decade, it is easy to point to the personal and political misjudgements that undid them. The true reason is likely a combination of both – difficult circumstances often played badly.

Whatever the reason, the rapid cycling of Prime Ministers raises questions about the stability of government and policy. If short tenures, often less than an electoral cycle, become the norm, this would challenge how we conduct politics. These are real issues of legitimacy, of how government operates, and of how those who rely on it respond. Understanding them is important for how our politics functions in an era of increased instability.

Whenever there is a change of PM, oppositions like to crow about an “unelected” leader taking over, constitutionally, they are misguided. At the technical level, we elect MPs, who, in turn, provide confidence to a Prime Minister appointed by the monarch. There is no mechanism for directly electing a Prime Minister, and no illegitimacy in one who has never faced a popular vote. Yet at the policy level, there are real reasons to be sceptical about this system.

The collapse of a leader generally suggests that they have failed. Support within their own party is generally a proxy for support in the wider country. Leaders are ousted when they begin to smell like electoral oblivion, either because they or their policies have foundered. Their successor will be expected to change tack, re-evaluate what was failing and do something better. But this, in turn, raises a question about the scope of their mandate and the extent to which they may deviate from the original manifesto.

This is more than a theoretical problem.

New legislative agendas must pass through Parliament, including the Lords. A lack of public endorsement and the protection afforded by the Salisbury Convention make them easier to amend and to block. A PM without a personal mandate may struggle to deliver convincing change, even when there is public demand for it. Theresa May serves as a stark reminder of what happens when someone attempts to lead without a mandate. She struggled to achieve a consensus on Brexit and failed further when she lost an election to secure one.

The economic challenge is different. A change of leader likely means a new Chancellor and a new fiscal direction. There are few constitutional brakes on that, provided the government has the parliamentary numbers to get a Budget passed and avoid a governmental collapse. It does, however, present a challenge for businesses that rely on government direction to make decisions.

Here, stability is a huge advantage. Everyone is, of course, aware of the democratic cycle and the reality that things can shift every five years or so. Chronic leadership instability shortens this time span. This creates difficulty for anyone trying to plan and direct investment. If it takes two or three years to develop an idea into a concrete outcome, rapid changes in the political situation can disrupt it. If the entire fiscal approach might change within the same timescale, everything becomes inherently riskier.

The same problem affects the public sector as well. We already know that state services are slow to implement change. Part of this is inertia; part of it is the reality that these are large organisations that take time to adapt to changing priorities and policies. Parliamentary terms allowed for this; effectively cutting them in half does not. This is more disruptive than the usual ebb and flow of ministerial changes, with a new PM likely to have different areas of interest and focus, which are rolled out before previous initiatives have properly bedded in.

There is a risk that we are drifting into an era of provisional Prime Ministers, and, consequently, temporary politics. Stability is self-reinforcing. Leaders who hold power for a credible period of time can deliver results, and doing so extends their legitimacy. The most consequential leaders of modern history are those who have achieved successive terms in power. The opposite appears to be true as well. Bad government causes instability, which in turn undermines governance further.

Britain’s constitutional flexibility is usually an advantage. Indeed, the rapid change of Prime Ministers is itself a result of this. Leaders do not remain in office once their moral authority is eroded, eking out a full term despite being a political lame duck. But it comes at a cost, and a sense of Prime Ministers as disposable undermines government authority, with the public, parliament, and business poorly served by changes in direction coming every couple of years.

These rapid-fire changes perhaps reflect the conditions we are in, and those who have ended up trying to manage them. If every political career ends in failure, it is striking how those that were once measured in decades now last a few years, and that time at the top has become fleeting rather than a sustained platform for delivery. Our system allows leaders to fall; it does not require them to be disposable. If tenures are shrinking, it is a sign not of constitutional weakness but of repeated political misjudgement.

As another premiership falters, it is perhaps worth thinking of why we end up in this situation so often, and the wider costs it brings.