Is Britain ungovernable?

Britain will soon have its fifth Prime Minister of the decade. Where Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak went before, Keir Starmer will shortly follow: the dustbin of history, consigned as a failure and humiliated one after another as “most unpopular Prime Minister in history”. Will Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner or Ed Miliband fare any better when one of them is the last one standing at the end of the contest to come?

There are common factors. A decade on from the Brexit wars unleashed by the 2016 referendum, much of the media is addicted to political crisis. All day every day, the Lobby seeks evidence of splits and division, sometimes mistaking human drama for news. In part, it’s an extension of long-term trends which report on politics as an endless horse race: who’s up, who’s down.

Less than 20 years into the social media age it all happens so much faster too. The news is no longer anchored to a handful of broadcast bulletins a day and a newspaper filing deadline in the evening. News cycles last at best hours and sometimes only minutes. In the past week alone, eery silences for a few hours on Tuesday and Thursday led many to believe the revolt against Starmer might have fizzled out, only for a new spasm of activity to burst onto rolling news channels and X feeds.

But the news cycle is the symptom, not the disease. Political reporters are not making up that Labour ministers are entirely out of patience with Starmer’s Downing Street and its chronic inability to make decisions. The frustration with a Prime Minister who promises to end incremental change with step-by-step progress is real.

And it speaks to the bigger problem. The past 20 years have also seen anaemic economic growth even before a succession of shocks which would shake the foundations of any government. A Scottish referendum which nearly broke up the United Kingdom. A Europe referendum which did rupture ties with the EU. Covid. Ukraine. Now Iran.

Who in the political class has the big idea for how you might build meaningful resilience to shocks? Who is prepared to explain trade-offs - for instance that higher defence spending in an unsettled world cannot come at the same time as rising domestic spending and lower taxes - rather than just do day-to-day patch and mend? Who can tell a story about the UK’s place in the world and what they want to achieve?

It cannot be impossible. Italy and Australia have emerged from a similar decade of turmoil at the top of their governments, belatedly electing leaders with a firm grip on who they want to be and where they want to go. Despite its challenges, the UK remains the fifth largest economy in the world, globally leading financial and professional services, an advanced manufacturing base and cultural exports which cross borders with ease.

As the UK electorate splinters in five or more directions the challenge for the pretenders to the No10 throne is who can break the trend?