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The belief that Britain is feeble, falling apart and in a state of semi-permanent political crisis is harped on so frequently that it has almost become conventional wisdom. This conviction will be further fuelled by the potential departure of Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, the fifth to be considered not up to the job and ejected from office since 2016.
Voltaire remarked 250 years ago that the English shot an admiral every so often “to encourage the others”, but these days we have switched to abruptly terminating prime ministers. It is unclear if shooting admirals led to improved performance by their successors, but the record shows that dispatching prime ministers does not mean that the next one along will do any better.
One explanation for their failure might be that Britain is unluckily drawing its leaders from an undiluted pool of duds. A more likely truth, however, is that ever since the financial crisis of 2008, no British prime minister has been able to grapple successfully with the huge problems facing the country.
Admittedly, several recent prime ministers have been charlatans or crackpots, but all were, to a greater or lesser degree, scapegoats for a failure to meet expectations that could never have been satisfied.
Starmer was always surprisingly accident prone for a successful lawyer and former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, a characteristic probably explained by his lack of political experience. This would have been less of a flaw had he not been such a poor judge of the kind of subordinates he needed to counter-balance his own failings. His former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, once lauded as a political genius by pundits, turned out to be more of a disaster-prone Jonah, supposing he was at least partly in charge of Downing Street during avoidable debacles since the general election of 2024.
If Starmer does stay, there is no reason to imagine that his performance will change for the better. Whatever the outcome of the present turmoil, he will have further reinforced his reputation as a serial blunderer and with his authority further diminished. But if he does go, would his successor survive any better when in the grip of the political rip tides that swirl around any occupant of 10 Downing Street? Starmer was roundly criticised for not having a plan or a vision following his landslide general election victory, but critics are circumspect or mute about what this magical plan or vision might have been that would put the country to rights.
The nature of British politics is changing. With five significant parties rather than two, the next general election will be fought between unofficial coalitions of progressives and conservatives. Starmer’s personal unpopularity, inarticulate style and political cack-handedness makes him the last person around whom such a progressive coalition might rally. As he fights for his political life this weekend, expressing fury about the failure of the Foreign Office to tell him of Peter Mandelson’s failed vetting, he comes across as dogged but baffled and ultimately ineffectual, which has been the tone of his entire time in office.
Maybe the last ship which might have rescued the Labour Party has already sailed and it no longer matters who is the next captain. The Gorton and Denton parliamentary by-election in Greater Manchester suggested that those whose priority is stopping Reform are plumping for the Greens. A Kent County Council by-election on 9 April – in a previous Reform seat in the party’s heartlands – saw the Greens squeezing the Labour vote and winning a solid victory.
Whatever the fate of Starmer, the latest crisis over his leadership will reinforce the impression of “broken Britain”. Having belittled Starmer for weeks, a smirking Donald Trump will welcome his latest upset. So too will Lord George Robertson, former defence secretary and ex-Nato chief, who accused him of “corrosive complacency” on defence, claiming that “we are under-prepared. We are under-insured. We are under attack.”
Another beneficiary of the turmoil in Westminster will be former Tory minister and recent defector to Reform UK, Robert Jenrick, who says Nigel Farage and Reform are the country’s “last shot” to fix “broken Britain”. He has explained that what finally drove him to change political horses was a Tory Shadow Cabinet meeting that decided Britain was not broken.
“The arsonists” – presumably “broken Britain” deniers – “were still in control of the party,” he said, leaving him no choice but to join Reform.
I am automatically dubious about the credibility of anybody boosting the “broken Britain” stereotype since it is demonstrably untrue or wildly exaggerated. Those who say so have never seen a truly broken country like Lebanon, Syria and Libya. Many others will have their own self-interested reasons for disaster mongering and threat inflation in order to foster support for their own agendas. But their claims about Britain’s real or potential cataclysmic decline are concocted fantasies.
Britain has declined in comparison with rival countries, and is over-conscious of its fall from imperial pre-eminence, but it remains a powerful and wealthy nation – though socially and geographically unequal – with an effective state machine providing adequate health care, education and security. Though degraded by poor management and lack of resources, the system still functions and is not in a state of collapse.
The danger is that so many people now believe in doom-laden fictions about the state of Britain that they will be lured into self-destructive counter-measures. Fake cures will be far worse than the disease. Britain suffers from a sort of national hypochondria, in which every failure or scandal, such as the Starmer-Mandelson imbroglio, is interpreted as one more symptom of national decline.
This exaggerated sense of threat provokes two contrary reactions. The first is excessive timidity born out of a belief that the British ship of state is in a fragile condition and cannot take much buffeting. This approach fits in well with Starmer’s conservative temperament, but voters who expected some change for the better are frustrated and alienated. A determination not to rock the boat abroad by confrontation with Trump came across as excessive feebleness, until the Iran war forced an end to these humiliating kowtows.
The greatest danger facing Britain is an over-reaction to the “broken Britain” narrative, opening up the country to poisonous antidotes and miracle cures served up by ideologues and charlatans. None of this is exactly new. In 2016 Britain voters were persuaded to leave the European Union, demonised as the source of their troubles, while a few months later the US voted for Trump, posing, as he still does, as national saviour pledged to rescue America from a dark abyss of his own imagining.
Ten years later, Britain is a diminished and more fragile country, while the US has turned into a rogue state, started an unnecessary and unwinnable war with Iran abroad and sinking into a lawless autocracy at home.
The melodrama surrounding Starmer’s battle to survive is gripping, but at the end of the day diversionary. Its real significance will be how far it boosts the political snake-oil salesmen who might really break Britain.
Further thoughts
British elections have become much more interesting and unpredictable as five political parties compete to persuade voters that they are the most electable standard bearer for the progressive or conservative cause. Tactical voting to defeat the other side has become the new normal.
This is what makes the UK local elections on 7 May so fascinating and important. They will presumably be a disaster for Labour and the Conservatives, but, more significantly, they will reveal how far supporters of Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrats are prepared to unite behind a single candidate to oppose Reform. This happened in Gorton and Denton on 28 February, where the Greens were victorious. But the constituency had long been a Labour stronghold and has a large immigrant population, so it is not entirely surprising that Reform failed to take the seat.
But in a little-noticed Kent County Council (KCC) by-election on 9 April in Cliftonville, a deprived area in Margate in east Kent, the advantages were all the other way. Granted, this was one council by-election in one ward. But this should be classic Reform territory in impoverished coastal Britain, the sort of place which in Kent, Essex and Lincolnshire was the launching pad first for Ukip and later Reform. Kent voted for Reform in the KCC landslide in May last year, which put them in control of the council. Margate is in the Isle of Thanet which Ukip won in 2015, the only council the party ever controlled. Farage chose Dover, another deprived Kent coastal town, to launch his party’s general election campaign in 2024.
In Cliftonville, Daniel Taylor was the successful Reform candidate in 2025, but this February he was given a 12-month prison sentence after admitting to behaving in a controlling or coercive manner towards his wife. A by-election was called, but was more like a parliamentary election with party leaders like Zack Polanski and Labour’s Emily Thornberry turning up to campaign. I know Cliftonville a little since it is about 15 miles from where I live in Canterbury. Houses built when Margate was a flourishing holiday destination – TS Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land there – look good from a distance, but on closer inspection have multiple bell pushes and are divided up into small flats for rent. Hotels were turned into care homes which became death traps during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Greens’ candidate, Rob Yates, an offshore wind farmer, won with 39 per cent of the vote, having won just 12 per cent in the KCC election last year. Reform candidate Marc Rattigan got 33 per cent, Conservatives 15 per cent and Labour 10 per cent, down from 22 per cent in 2025. It was a serious defeat for Reform, which put real effort into its campaign, but a disaster for Labour which had presented itself as best positioned to defeat Reform.
As for Reform, the result showed that it is vulnerable when its opponents unite against it, even in its traditional strongholds. What is unclear is how far this will be replicated on 7 May.
Beneath the radar
The US-Israel war on Iran following the Gaza conflict has led to a historic decline in American support for Israel according to the latest poll by the Pew Research Centre. Six in 10 Americans now have a very or somewhat unfavourable view of Israel, up nearly 20 points since 2022. The proportion of adults with a very negative view has nearly tripled from 10 per cent in 2022.
This switch is of great importance because Israeli military success in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran over the last two and a half years has depended on the US acting as effective co-belligerent. Heavily eroded American popular support for Israel and failure to win a decisive joint victory against Iran have put this close alliance, which has only existed since 2021, in doubt.
Republicans may overall be more likely than not to favour Israel, but 57 per cent of Republicans aged between 18 and 49 have an unfavourable view. Religious affiliation is important. Pew says that “Jewish Americans and white evangelical Protestants have mostly positive views of Israel, at 64 per cent and 65 per cent respectively”. Support is less among white non-evangelical Protestants (39 per cent), Catholics (35 per cent), black Protestants (33 per cent) and the religiously unaffiliated (22 per cent). About six in 10 Americans have “little or no confidence in [Benjamin] Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs”.
Unclear but crucial is how far this transformation in public opinion about Israel will impact on the primaries and the midterms – and how far it will distance Trump from Netanyahu, who, by all accounts, persuaded the President to launch the war against Iran in the mistaken expectation that the Iranian regime would swiftly collapse.
Cockburn’s picks
Well worth watching is this BBC interview with American commentator Tucker Carlson, vividly illustrating why the most eloquent and effective voices of the American right have turned on Trump.
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