British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fended off intensifying calls to stand down after disastrous election results.
Four ministers have resigned, and Health Secretary Wes Streeting is widely expected to launch a leadership challenge. Britain has had five premiers in the 10 years since the Brexit referendum; before that, it had five in 29 years. Starmer is “tedious and … terrible at politics,” a prominent commentator wrote in The Spectator, but Britain’s problems are not of his making; governments keep failing because in the years since the financial crisis, the country’s economy has hardly grown.
But “hating Starmer was far easier” than addressing the decline’s causes, including overregulation, Brexit, and vast welfare bills: “You’ll miss [him] when he’s gone.”
