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.