Charisma Alone Can’t Fix Britain

Ten years ago this week, I woke up in southeast London to learn that Britain had voted for Brexit. I remember my oldest daughter, who was then 7, asking what Brexit was. I said Britain would be leaving Europe. She was baffled. “Where do they want to go?” she asked. “Africa?”

Thus began a period of political tumult that hasn’t let up since. Yesterday, the sixth post-Brexit prime minister resigned. Keir Starmer, who won a landslide election less than two years ago, lost the trust of voters and many officials in his own party.

The man poised to take over is charismatic, popular and, crucially, from a modest background in the north of England. But is that enough? Today, I write about how Britain’s economic problems, made worse by leaving the E.U., are so serious that it will take more than a change in leadership to solve them.

Ten years, six prime ministers

The writing was on the wall.

First, the right-wing populist Reform U.K. party led by Nigel Farage, the mastermind of Brexit, overtook the governing Labour Party in opinion polls more than a year ago. Then it actually beat Labour in a set of local elections across England. The calls for Starmer to resign have not stopped.

On Monday, he stepped down.

It’s a remarkable downfall for a politician whose party won one of the biggest postwar parliamentary majorities only two years ago.

But it also says something bigger about the challenges Britain is facing. Growth is stagnating, the government is deeply indebted and the health care system is underfunded. Reform is pushing a muscular anti-immigrant populism that has captured the support of about a quarter of Britons.

In the 10 years since it voted to leave the E.U., Britain has cycled through six prime ministers, who have all failed to address the country’s deep malaise. It’s about to get a seventh.

Will it make a difference? The man expected to take over is Andy Burnham, a popular former mayor of Greater Manchester. Many in his party want to believe that he can somehow shake Labour, and the country, out of its funk.

But, as my colleague Michael D. Shear writes, if Burnham does make it to Downing Street, all of the challenges that brought down Starmer will still be there. And so far at least, there’s little to suggest that a Burnham government would differ drastically in policy terms.

‘King of the North’

Andy Burnham is the most popular Labour politician in the country and maybe the only one routinely referred to by his first name.

At 56, he is seven years younger than Starmer. He was born and raised in the northwest, with the accent to prove it. His father was a phone engineer and his mother was a doctor’s receptionist. He is seen as someone who understands the grievances of people who live outside of London and the wealthy southeast.

And he has earned a reputation for standing up for them. As mayor, he reversed the privatization of Manchester’s bus system, introducing free and low-cost travel on bright yellow “bee buses” in the city center. During Covid, his protests against harsh lockdown measures earned him the nickname the King of the North.

Starmer, by contrast, never got a cool nickname — he’s not, at least in public, a cool nickname kind of guy. His lack of charisma has compounded his government’s lack of tangible results. Voters seriously dislike him now.

“Men don’t want to be his mate and women don’t want to give him a hug” the left-leaning magazine The New Statesman wrote in an article titled “Why you hate Keir Starmer.”

In Burnham, Labour will have a better storyteller with arguably a better story to tell. But Britain at this moment needs more than good stories.

Ten years after Brexit

The British economy is in a bad way. Brexit hasn’t helped.

Years of underinvestment mean that health care, energy, transport and defense need more money. But the government doesn’t have it. Public debt as a share of gross domestic product is at 94 percent, primarily because of the financial crisis and the pandemic. Interest payments now amount to more than the annual budget of the entire public education system.

It’s not clear that Burnham can do all that much about it. Last September, he lamented that Britain shouldn’t be “in hock to the bond markets.” Most took this as a sign that Burnham, whose politics lean left, would borrow more to spend more if he were prime minister.

But when bond traders — the ones who’d be lending the government that money — pushed interest rates up, Burnham backtracked. There needs to be a plan to shrink Britain’s debt, he said. And yes, he would keep to strict fiscal rules.

What this reveals is that he’s facing the same bad choices as his predecessors.

Can Burnham fix Britain? It’s a tall order indeed. But his background may help take the sting out of Reform’s story about Westminster elites who don’t care about left-behind voters. And his charisma might help in a contest against Farage, the Reform leader.

In a special election last week, Burnham trounced his Reform rival in a northwestern constituency that 10 years ago overwhelmingly voted for Brexit.

His fans hope that he might at least have what it takes to beat Reform, which for now is the No. 1 priority of the Labour Party. But that, too, might take more than charisma and a northern accent. If Burnham becomes prime minister, he’ll have a little over three years until the next election to deliver results — if he can survive that long.

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