What’s next for the UK after Starmer?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, June 23rd, and this is your FT News Briefing. We'll take a look at what a post-Kier Starmer UK looks like. And we've got another signal that private equity is struggling. Plus, Colombian voters are fed up with the return of violence in their country. I'm Mark Filippino, and here's the news you need to start your day.
Keir Starmer announced yesterday that he's stepping down as UK Prime Minister.
The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election. I have heard the answer and I accept that answer with good grace.
The Labour Party leader made the call just days after the crucial Makerfield by-election. Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham won that seat in Parliament. And it looks like he'll make an uncontested bid for PM. Burnham's main competition, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting, backed down yesterday. The FT's Political Fix podcast talked about all this. You're going to hear an excerpt from Monday's show where the FT's political editor, George Parker, and deputy political editor, Jim Pickard, joined Whitehall editor, Lucy Fisher. They broke down what this all means for the future of UK politics. Here's Lucy.
George, some sense of anxiety, even within Labour, about whether Burnham will be properly tested. And it springs to mind for me with Theresa May. It was said one of the failings of her administration was that she hadn't been put through her paces properly in a leadership contest when she got down to the final two and her rival, Andrea Leadsom, dropped out. People in hindsight thought maybe if there'd been more scrutiny of her policy platform, that would have strengthened her. Is Andy Burnham going to fall into the same trap?
Quite likely, I think, because he will enter number 10 pretty much untested. We know from the last few weeks as we started to ask questions about Andy Burnham and his slightly sketchy policy prospectus that if you poke some of his ideas enough, they start to fall apart. You know, the idea of excluding defence from the fiscal rules, abandon that. There are a whole load of things that Andy Burnham has said that he'd like to do from the vantage point of Manchester, but he will soon be... in the next few weeks when he becomes prime minister, part of the Westminster elite, which he's been decrying for quite a long time and facing exactly the same political economic constraints that Keir Starmer has.
And there are a lot of people nervous about him arriving untested, without a team, and with some of his ideas really not fully formed, to put it politely.
And Jim, it feels to me there's going to be a period now of soul searching in Westminster where people really try and engage with this question of whether the UK has become ungovernable. I've really detected a sense of quite a lot of regret, even among some opposition MPs, that we're now about to see our seventh prime minister in 10 years, likely to be our eighth chancellor, our 10th foreign secretary in that time. It's not good for the future of the country, is it?
No, and one of the things that Keir Starmer ostensibly promised was that he said there would be stability, we wouldn't have all the constant churn that we had under the Tories when I think they had something ridiculous like 15 housing ministers in 15 years, and that there would be a period of stability.
What happened when Keir Starmer announced he was stepping down as UK prime minister?
And I think there is a danger to the Labour brand that the one thing they still kind of had going for them was that things could have been a little bit more stable. I've been thinking about this this morning, and I've thought for quite a long time that we as a country, or as a political Westminster bubble, are far too led by opinion polls. Our whole political system is obsessed with, if you're behind in the opinion polls, even midterm, when political parties that are in government are always less popular. So that was just one thought I had. I also thought as well that, you know, there is a sense to which we the media are part of the process in which once the idea takes hold that a premiere is done for, we write more and more about how done for they are to the point where cabinet ministers are reading what we the media write.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:02–3:31
2
What happened when Keir Starmer announced he was stepping down as UK prime minister?
3:31–9:42
3
Why is Andy Burnham likely to face criticism for being 'untested' as a potential PM?
9:42–12:03
4
How could an uncontested Labour leadership change affect party stability and governance?
12:03–12:28