Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer leaves 10 Downing Street in central London on July 15, 2026. | Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty ImagesIn 2024 the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, led by Sir Keir Starmer, won back the prime minister’s office after more than a decade out of power.He told a jubilant crowd: “Change begins right here!” Starmer was right that British voters wanted change; unfortunately for him, they pretty quickly wanted him out too. Starmer is stepping down on Monday — making him Britain’s sixth prime minister in less than a decade. “We’re just not used to this,” Tom McTague, editor of the New Statesman magazine, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world…and now we have become Italy only with bad weather and worse food.”McTague talked to Rameswaram about why Starmer flamed out so fast, the far-right candidate angling to take the top job, and why the incoming prime minister, nicknamed “the King of the North,” might be Labour’s best shot at turning things around.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.Why is Britain on its way to a seventh prime minister in a decade?We are living through very, very weird times here in Britain. We’re just not used to this. We sort of prided ourselves on being this island of stability in a crazy world — we could smugly look out on countries like Italy or Australia as they churned through their prime ministers, and we just held steady with Margaret Thatcher for 10 years or Tony Blair for 10 years. Now we have become Italy, only with bad weather and worse food.I think, big picture, we’re actually not that different to the rest of the Western world in this regard, in that all of the same reasons that cause disquiet in the United States or in France or in Germany are the same kind of reasons that are causing political disquiet here. Immigration, poor economic growth, living standards not improving as quickly as we’re used to, inflation post-pandemic — all of that comes together and it creates similar forces that you see in the US. So we have electoral coalitions, the rise of people who can communicate super well on social media in the new age who grab hold of attention.It’s just that what is happening here is happening in our parliamentary context rather than a presidential context, where you elect a president and they are there for a full term whether they’re unpopular or not. Here, if you lose the confidence of the public or the confidence of members of parliament, then suddenly you can be out on your ear within weeks or months.Let’s talk about the last time there was a major shift. It was in 2024 when voters had become wary of the Conservative Party in the UK, and that’s when they elected the Labour Party and its leader Keir Starmer into office?They elected them with a landslide — an astonishing majority in the House of Commons, enough to basically do whatever they wanted. But I think once he’d got into power, he didn’t really know how he wanted to change the country. He stood on a manifesto of “change,” in quotes — it was a kind of hopey-changey thing, without much substance to it.In one sense, he was quite a small-c conservative man. He wanted to just get this thing working again, and he thought you could do that through sensible, incremental, rational, technocratic change. And I think that analysis has proven fundamentally flawed.What follows Keir Starmer? Does the Labour Party retain control of parliament?Yes. So the Labour Party fundamentally has kicked out its own prime minister. It’s based on the fact that he was deeply, deeply unpopular in the country, and they thought if they hung around with this guy any longer that they were all screwed, basically, and that they would all lose their jobs. That’s the reason why he’s been removed from power. He lost the support of his members of parliament and his cabinet, who eventually turned on him and looked to the man who’s going to replace him — a guy called Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Greater Manchester.Tell us a bit about him. I mean, they call him the King of the North?Yeah, like the Game of Thrones stuff — he’s going to sort of come down with his, I don’t even know what they’re called, White Walkers, is it, or something?The North of England is, I guess, the equivalent of the Rust Belt Midwest kind of vibe. It’s seen as a place that is a bit more down to earth, a bit more post-industrial. It’s got more economic problems — it’s a place which used to be rock-solid Labour but has moved to the right. And so I think there is an opportunity here for Andy Burnham to win the next election and stick around for a bit longer.You talk about leaders in the UK thus far having lacked a mandate or perhaps a broad vision for the country. I wonder if the person who has those things right now is Nigel Farage. Could you tell our audience a bit about him?Nigel Farage was the man that was introduced to America by Donald Trump as “Mr. Brexit.” He is the figure on the populist right of British politics who has stood outside of the Conservative Party — the traditional party of the right here — and challenged it for not being conservative enough, for not being patriotic enough, for not being tough enough on borders and immigration.All of the things that happened to the Republican Party from the Tea Party or from Donald Trump — it’s just that he did that from outside of the Conservative Party. And he is a kind of charismatic figure, a very good public speaker, very hard to pin down, speaks kind of fluently and off the cuff.He was finally elected to the House of Commons at the last election for his insurgent populist party called Reform UK. And from that position, he has taken the party into the lead in the polls. But something else is going on now, where because he is a prospective future prime minister, he is facing a level of scrutiny that he hasn’t faced before.So all sorts of stuff is going on in British politics, which sounds completely wild.People are looking at this situation — this run of prime ministers, this ascendancy of Nigel Farage — and they say the UK has become ungovernable. What would you argue the situation is, Tom?Look, I would argue that it’s parliamentary democracy at its messy kind of fundamentals. Britain is a country, like many countries in Western Europe, which is struggling to work out how it’s going to make its way in the world in the 21st century, in a world where so many of the assumptions which we have come to take for granted no longer appear to be holding.A United States that is a trusted ally — that is changing. Free market economics, global free trade appears to be ending. And you add into that social media, the AI revolution, all of this. It feels like the turmoil in British politics is just a reflection of a kind of turmoil in the world and in the global economy. You can see the same sorts of questions going on in Canada and in Australia and France and Germany. And I don’t think anyone really has the answers yet, and Britain certainly doesn’t.