Things can only get better?

It has been 2 years since Rishi Sunak stood outside Downing Street, rain heaving down in an apt metaphor for his premiership and that of 14 years of Conservative rule. There, with the tune of “Things can only get better” blaring in the background, he signed the death warrant for his Party’s time in government and called a general election.

2 years on, a Labour landslide later, and the promise of change now ringing hollow for millions across the country, it was a sunny day on which Keir Starmer made the short walk from number 10 to his lectern to announce his resignation as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. I suspect the walk back to number 10 from his lectern was far longer than even he would have anticipated.

To win a landslide election and be gone in 2 years is something that, historically, is without precedent and yet comes as a wholly unsurprising finale to a premiership that had so much potential but ultimately concluded with a man widely despised, grey, and without allies on the scores on commons benches sat just behind him. He has taken the march of Sisyphus, pushed the boulder into government, and now succumb under its heavy burden of hope and expectation. The weight of power sits heavy on even the broadest shoulders, and no one can withstand forever.

Our politics, our system of governing, our political discourse, has been broken, toxic, and unrelenting for a long time now. Indeed, this is a reflection of the broader global political shift towards the alluring arms of populism, manufactured by years of neo-liberal neglect to which the UK, far from being an exception, is arguably the poster boy.

Still, in such times, stability and rebuild is what is needed, but all to often not what is wanted by so many. Change needs to be delivered yesterday and, when it isn’t, the tide of anger swells into a tsunami rather quickly, whether fairly or not. Under that tide is where Starmer has found himself unable to swim, but a reflection on his 2 years deserves more than just an emotional synopsis.

Before we dive into a public vivisection of Keir Starmer, complete with amateur constitutional experts on Facebook who have never read a policy document but are nevertheless certain that the answer is “send them all back”, it is worth remembering one thing: Starmer did actually achieve quite a lot.

Labour’s 2024 victory was extraordinary. Not necessarily in the sense that it reflected some great national outpouring of love for Keir himself, because it plainly did not. Labour won just over a third of the popular vote, with much of the country voting tactically, reluctantly, or simply voting for the Conservatives to finally stop setting fire to the proverbial curtains. Still, from the wreckage of 2019, when Labour had been reduced to barley 200 MPs and looked like a Party increasingly defined by civil war, Brexit confusion, and a total aversion to electability, Starmer delivered 411 seats.

That is not an accident nor was it incidental, and it is not merely something that happened to him while he was wandering through his sparse backbenches hoping for the glory days of them being more full to return. It was the result of rebuilding a Party that had become almost impossible to sell to the public, restoring a sense of discipline, seriousness and, most importantly, basic credibility.

He took Labour from a position where its own supporters could barely agree on what it was for, and made it once again look like a government in waiting. For all the criticisms that can and should be made of him, the idea that he did not do the difficult work is simply untrue. He did the boring, tedious, often thankless work of making Labour look like a Party capable of running a country rather than a particularly tense university seminar.

Then, in government, Labour has passed meaningful legislation.

The Employment Rights Act, for example, is not glamorous. Indeed, It is hard to make day-one parental leave sound like the storming of the Bastille, although I am sure somebody in Labour HQ tried to put it on a mug (remember the Miliband “Controls on Immigration” merch? What a time...). Still, it is real and material change. Stronger protections from unfair dismissal, reforms to statutory sick pay, new bereavement rights, protections for pregnant workers, and action against exploitative zero-hours contracts will make a tangible difference to millions of people, particularly those who have spent years being treated by employers as disposable accessories with a payroll number that yields legitimacy to their poor treatment.

The same is true of renters’ rights. The end of Section 21 no-fault evictions in England is a genuinely significant rebalancing of power between tenant and landlord. Tenants can no longer simply be removed because they have become inconvenient to someone’s investment portfolio, while restrictions on rent in advance and stronger rights around pets and tenancy security represent a shift that should have happened years ago. It may not make rent cheap overnight, sadly, but it does mean that millions of people are at least a little less likely to find themselves looking for a new home because their landlord wants to turn the living room into an Airbnb themed around Peaky Blinders or a treehouse or something.

On housing, Labour has finally begun treating the shortage of homes as the enormous structural crisis that it is. Planning reform, more density around transport links, brownfield development, and the aim of building 1.5 million homes are not exactly the kind of things that send the nation into a euphoric frenzy. Again, nobody has ever crowd-surfed at Glastonbury chanting “streamlined local plan consultations”. But housebuilding is essential. Britain cannot continue pretending that a functioning country can be built on unaffordable rents, inherited wealth, and young people living with their parents until they are thirty-seven.

On the NHS, waiting lists have come down, additional appointments have been delivered, and reforms to cut bureaucracy have at least begun. None of that means the health service is fixed. It absolutely is not. Anyone who has tried to get a GP appointment at 8:01am on a Monday will know that we are not quite yet living in the sunlit uplands. But it is progress and that word is too often overlooked in political discourse.

Internationally, Starmer restored something else that had been eroded under the final years of Conservative rule: the sense that Britain could enter a room without first checking whether its Prime Minister had insulted someone, crashed the economy, or been photographed at a party they had assured us never happened. His work with European allies, particularly around Ukraine and wider security, gave Britain a seriousness abroad that had been increasingly absent.

Readers of my previous pieces will, I’m sure, now be getting a sense of deja-vu. I am not intending here to sound like a broken record. Rather, I believe there is more merit than is often conceded on focusing on material policy rather than the theatre of politics. These are important pieces of legislation, the building blocks for tangible change and, as such, bear repeating in a landscape that is too often happily consumed by personal abuse, fear, and ignorance. This is not, however, an argument that Starmer was perfect. Far from it. It is merely an argument that the caricature of him as a man who achieved nothing is wrong.

The tragedy is that these achievements were largely slow, structural, legislative, and difficult to feel in everyday life. Again, this will sound like I’m repeating myself, but Politics is not marked like coursework. You do not get a respectable 2:1 because your methodology is sound while the electorate waits patiently for the results section. People do not feel grateful because a government has passed good legislation if their rent is still obscene, their food shop costs a small mortgage, and their local bus only appears when it’s a blood moon.

Starmer did a great deal. The problem is that much of it was either not yet felt, not explained, or buried beneath the wider sense that nothing had really changed.

None of this alone, however, explains the deeply viscerally and quite personal hatred so many feel towards Starmer. Where does it come from? The uncomfortable answer is that people do not judge governments by white papers; they judge them by whether their lives feel less difficult and, when they don’t, it’s the person at the top that’s going to get the flack.

Labour can point to workers’ rights, renters’ rights, planning reform, green investment, improvements in NHS performance and a more stable international posture. All of that is real but little of it feels tangible at this stage. For millions of people, life still feels as expensive, insecure and exhausting as it did two years ago, if not more so.

That is why Labour’s polling collapse has been so severe. Reform is leading in every poll, Labour is stuck around the high teens, the Conservatives are somehow still clinging on to life, and the Greens have positioned themselves as the temporary housing for many voters who feel Labour has compromised too much and delivered too little. It is a political ecosystem in which everyone is unhappy, nobody trusts anybody, and a quarter of the electorate appears ready to hand the country to whichever man can look the angriest in a video filmed vertically.

This is not entirely fair to Labour, which I know is a shocking revelation coming from a Party member. The inheritance of 2024 was truly catastrophic with fourteen years of austerity, stagnant wages, collapsing local government finances, chronic NHS backlogs, hollowed-out public services, Brexit damage, housing failure and the Liz Truss economic experiment. No government, of any persuasion, could repair all of that in two years. But this is also where Labour’s defence begins to run out of road.

The public can understand that change takes time, look at how long HS2… oh wait. What they struggle to understand is why, when Labour secured such a vast parliamentary majority, the Government so often appeared to be operating as though it had been returned with four MPs and a hung parliament with as much power as Nick Clegg had.

Labour could have been bolder. It could have put far more social housing at the centre of its programme. It could have moved faster on poverty, including the two-child benefit cap. It could have made fairer taxation more central, particularly on wealth and unearned income. It could have offered a more muscular plan to reduce household bills through public ownership and insulation. It could have given people cheaper transport, stronger local services, and a clearer sense that the state was finally on their side.

Instead, too often, Labour’s message was one of restraint. Of caution, fiscal responsibility and difficult decisions, albeit against a large wave of outdate state bureaucracy which inevitably slows everything to a crawl.

There is a place for seriousness in government. In fact, there is a desperate need for it and I have great sympathy and understanding for the rationale under which such an approach was taken. However, seriousness without a tangible vision soon begins to look like coldness. Discipline without hope becomes managerialism, and managerialism is not something that inspires people.

Keir Starmer is a Prime Minister for a different age. He is a Major-era politician in a populist era. In the 1990s, his seriousness, caution, and administrative competence may have been seen as reassuring. In the age of social media, algorithms built to reinforce hatred and rage, and political influencers, he came across as remote.

This is not because he is unintelligent, quite the contrary, and nor is it because he lacks decency. By all accounts, he is a fundamentally decent man whether you agree with him or not. It is because he struggled to make people feel anything in a political climate where, as much as I may hate it, feeling has become as important as policy.

Reform understands this. It offers emotion, explanation and enemy. The Greens understand it too, albeit from the other direction. They offer moral clarity, anger at compromise, and a place for people who want politics to feel like a statement of principle (which is presumably why entryism from protest groups is so rife in their Party, but anyway).

This does not mean Reform or the Greens are right. In fact, plenty of their proposals collapse the moment they encounter the mild inconvenience of reality. But their emotional offer is far clearer and far more resonant, such is the luxury of opposition. Reform says: “You have been betrayed, and we know who did it.” The Greens say: “You have been betrayed, and we will not compromise.” Labour said: “We have commissioned a taskforce.”

Still, the treatment of Starmer has often gone far beyond political criticism. Some of the hatred directed at him has been grotesque, obsessive, and wildly disproportionate. It has often felt less like accountability and veering more towards a national pastime in which people compete to invent the most absurd possible reason to despise a man they have never met.

There is a difference between saying Starmer was too cautious, too distant, too technocratic and too unwilling to pursue a genuinely transformative agenda, and pretending he is personally responsible for every pothole, food-bank queue and death in the middle east since 2024.

He is not a monster and he is not a traitor. He is not the architect of Britain’s decline. He is a serious, capable, but limited politician who inherited a broken country, delivered some important reforms, but has ultimately failed to persuade enough people that he had a destination worth travelling towards. That is a political failure and there’s no dressing that up, but it is not a moral crime worthy of the Hague.

With relation to his (very likely) successor, Andy Burnham is not Prime Minister yet but he is plainly the favourite.

His Makerfield victory was commanding: 55% of the vote, a majority of more than 9,000 over Reform, and more votes than Reform and Restore Britain combined. This was an astonishing victory for him in what has increasingly become a Reform heartland following the Local Elections. It matters not simply because it returned him to Parliament, but because it did so in a campaign framed as a test of whether Labour could still beat populism directly. This was a test that Burnham passed very comfortably.

There are caveats, of course. Indeed, tactical voting played a huge role with the Greens and Lib Dems squeezed enormously. Starmer’s unpopularity almost certainly played a role too, and there were naturally voters who backed Burnham not because they had read every line of his emerging (and still very raw) policy platform, but because they saw him as a route out of the current mess.

But that’s politics, people vote for hope, for change, for familiarity, for fear, for the candidate who seems least likely to ruin everything. A convincing win is still a convincing win.

More importantly, Burnham has something Starmer no longer possessed: personal political capital.

He is not universally adored. Nobody in modern British politics is, aside from perhaps Count Binface, but Burnham’s appeal is unusually broad. He comes across as recognisably human. He can speak about unfairness without appearing to have received the speech in a briefing pack five minutes earlier. He has regional executive experience, a record on transport and devolution, and an ability to speak in a language that feels less like Westminster and more like the country beyond it.

This is not to say that charisma alone fixes anything. Boris Johnson had charisma, and much in the same way as a lit bin, he attracts attention, creates heat, and usually ends with someone having to clean up a mess. But Burnham’s appeal is paired with a more substantive programme than some are willing to acknowledge.

He has spoken about social care reform, stronger public control over water, transport and energy, restoring the £2 bus cap, greater devolution, council-tax reform, more social housing, and rethinking the way the Treasury suffocates regional investment.

The broad direction here is far more promising than the politics of managed decline, even if it is not a full policy platform just yet. The opportunity here for Burnham is that he can make Labour feel like Labour again in the sense of reconnecting practical delivery with a clear moral purpose. That is the political ground Burnham could occupy and the ground Labour must.

However, he should not confuse winning Makerfield with winning Britain.

Greater Manchester is a success story. It has shown what a capable mayor can do with a degree of local power, a coherent vision, and an actual bus network. But the country is not Greater Manchester. The national state is more constrained, more divided, more bureaucratic, and more financially fragile.

Burnham will inherit the same public services, the same difficult fiscal picture, the same fragmented electorate, and the same populist threat that consumed Starmer. His advantage is not that these problems disappear when he arrives but that the public has not yet decided what it thinks of him.

Starmer’s image had, ultimately, calcified. Every announcement was viewed through the prism of disappointment and this became self-fulfilling eventually. Burnham has the chance to begin again, to communicate with warmth, and to make policy feel like a promise with weight rather than a press release served with jelly.

Whether he can do that will decide whether this is a genuine renewal or simply another changing of the guard in a country increasingly addicted to changing the guard.

This brings us to a more reflective question on Starmer’s place in history. I rather suspect his premiership will be remembered as a profoundly strange one.

He was the man who made Labour electable again and who restored a semblance competence after Conservative chaos. He was the man who passed significant reforms on workers’ rights, renters’ rights, planning, energy and public services. He was also the man who, despite all of that, became so unpopular that his own MPs concluded they could not go into the next election with him still at the helm.

That is not nothing, and it is not a simple story of failure. It is a story of a politician who did much of the difficult, unglamorous work of government, but never found a way to translate it into optimism.

Perhaps that will be his legacy: the man who pushed the boulder up the hill so someone else could stand at the top and take the photograph.

That may sound unfair: it probably is unfair. But politics has rarely been fair, particularly to those who mistake competence for affection.

Burnham now has an opportunity that most politicians could only dream of. He can inherit a huge majority, a government that has already laid some important legislative foundations, and a public desperate for someone to make the country feel as though it is moving again.

To do this, he must be radical, but not in the performative and vague sense of posting a black-and-white photograph with the word “change” underneath it. Radical in a way that is practical, visible and, most importantly, felt.

People need to see more homes being built. They need to feel bills coming down. They need buses that turn up. They need GPs who can see them. They need secure work, local services, decent pay, and a sense that the state can do more than explaining why it cannot do anything.

The wider problem, however, remains. Britain has now had six Prime Ministers in a decade, with a seventh imminent. That is not normal. It is not healthy. It is not the mark of a political system functioning as it should. It is evidence of a country that has become deeply fractured, deeply impatient and increasingly incapable of sustaining political authority for longer than the lifespan of a mayfly.

Burnham may yet be the person who breaks that cycle. He has more charisma than Starmer, more emotional intelligence than most of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and a better instinct for how to talk to people who feel ignored by Westminster, but he will not be granted unlimited time.

The country is no longer patient. Reform is waiting on one side with anger, grievance and easy answers. The Greens are waiting on the other with ideological purity and moral posturing. The Conservatives are still somewhere nearby too, I assume.

Burnham will need to hit the ground running. He will need to be bold enough to deliver change, careful enough to make it work, and human enough to make people believe it. He will need to show that Labour is not simply a better manager of a broken country, but the Party capable of rebuilding it.

Starmer’s downfall was not that he lacked intelligence, decency or purpose. It was that he could not make people see or feel the future he was trying to build.

Burnham’s challenge is to make that future visible before the country decides it would rather burn the whole thing down and start again.