Front Burner - Is the U.K. ungovernable?

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

After a weekend of speculation, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer appeared on the steps of 10 Downing Street on Monday and announced that he would be stepping down. He’s now the sixth British Prime Minister to resign in the last 10 years, continuing a pattern many thought would end after he won a majority government with the Labour Party in a landslide just two years ago. Zoë Grünewald is a freelance journalist based in London, England. She’s also a regular panelist on the politics podcast ‘Oh God, What Now?’. She’s here to talk about the conditions that have made it so hard for the country to hold onto a Prime Minister, and what that means for people in the U.K.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

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That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-U-S dot CA. Cargooros.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hey everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. After a weekend of speculation, the UK Prime Minister Kirstarmer appeared on the steps of 10 Downing Street on Monday and announced that he would be stepping down.

The question my party is asking now is whether I am best place to lead us into the next general election. I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question. And I accept that answer with good grace. He is now the sixth British Prime Minister to resign in the last 10 years. To jog your memory, he joins the likes of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, who actually couldn't even outlast ahead of lettuce in a blonde wig, and Rishi Sunak.

To put it into perspective, Larry the Cat that lives at 10 Downing has remained there for all six of these prime ministers. Many hopes Starmar would put an end to the pattern after he won a majority government with the Labor Party in a landslide just two years ago. The revolving door of PMs begs the question, is the UK ungovernable? To talk about how Britain found themselves here and the conditions that have made it so hard for the country to hold on to a prime minister, I'm joined again by Zoe Grunewald, a freelance journalist and regular panelist on the podcast, Oh God, What Now. Zoe, hey, thanks for coming on. Hello, thank you for having me.

It's nice to see you. It's good to have you back on the show. Let's get straight into what is even going on here. I know the Kirstarmert has been on this trajectory for some time, but I've seen the events of the last few days kind of described as like a really big movement. mood shift within the government. And Starmour had said before that he wouldn't step down and would take on any leadership challenge. How did things change so drastically over the last few days just take me through the lead-up to his announcement? Yeah, so you're absolutely right. The last six months have been very difficult for Kyr Stama. He's been hemorrhaging support

amongst his party. As of a few minutes ago, out of 403 Labour MPs, there are at least 70 now who no longer back the PM, including five ministerial aids. And actually, even before that, he was struggling to keep a lot of his backbenchers on side. But the specific thing that was stopping backbenchers from moving against him, or the party from moving against him, was the lack of another candidate. There were a couple of people who, you know, their name was in circulation, that they might want to take over from Kyrs Tarma. But there were various issues there.

They couldn't gather the support of their party or their... colleagues or they had various other issues. One of these particular candidates was Andy Burnham, who was the mayor of Greater Manchester. Now, he had a lot of support in the party. The problem was he wasn't an MP, so he couldn't actually go for the leadership. So there had to be this kind of orchestration going on behind the scenes to get Andy Burnham into Parliament where he could mount a leadership challenge. And it's been this very surreal situation where everybody knows this is what's been going on. Kirstama has been governing as usual, while a coup is emerging in the background. And of course, last week we finally had this by-election in Makerfield, which is in the

north of England, where Andy Burnham won the seat and has become an MP, he's been sworn in today. Everyone knows that politics isn't working. Everyone can feel that the country isn't where it should be. Tonight could, just could, be the turning point. That makes his path to a leadership election very, very clear. And I think over the weekend, Kirstama did some soul searching, some talking to his

colleagues, and he realised that actually with Andy Burnham in Parliament, there was no route to Kirstama being able to continue on his Prime Minister. The herd was moving, it was stampeding. They had their next candidate, and therefore he had decided today it's better to stand aside. And tell me more about why people like Andy Burnham so much as an alternative to Kier-Stormer. So Burnham's been around for quite a long time. He's served under Tony Blair.

He's seen as quite a figure of stability in a Labour Party that has gone through several iterations in the past 20 years. And actually, you could argue that no one really knows what the true Andy Burnham is because he's been, there's an old joke and I hate to repeat it, but your listeners might not have heard before. It's definitely done the rounds a lot in the UK now. But it's that a Blairite, a brownite and a corbinite walking to a bar and the barman says, Hi, Andy, what are you having? Because the point is he has been, has given his loyalty to a lot of Labour leaders with different views. But the reason people like Andy Burnham now is because he's been mayor of greater Manchester and he's been really popular in that role. He's delivered

a lot of things to the people of Manchester. People talk a lot about the bus network particularly. he's got this kind of, you know, he's a good communicator, he's charismatic. He often see him with a pint in his hand. He has a laugh. And I think he just looks kind of diametrically opposed to the Kirstama that voters have come to dislike, much more buttoned up. You never really see the real Kirstama. They don't trust him because they don't know who he is. So I think that is why Andy Burnham has really emerged as a potential frontrunner to succeed Kirstama. And is it right for me to say that this is already kind of shaping up as like a coronation of sorts? Like Andy Burnham's up to, I think, a pretty good start. There are already MPs that are throwing their support behind him. I also will just note that I saw this picture of him in the back of a car that, like, is making the rounds, like a tabloid photo. And usually the British press runs terrible photos of people in backs of cars.

And he looks fine. So that's probably a plus too. Yeah, it does look like it probably will be a coronation. Things can change. You never know. British politics moves in strange ways. But it's essentially going to be a very quick process. So nominations to replace Kirstama

open on the 9th of July and they close when Parliament goes into summer recess on the 16th. If there's no challenger to Andy Burnham and at the minute it doesn't look like there will be one, he could be coronated very quickly after the last. that as the new Labour leader. If there is a contest, it will be the first of September, which is when we'll have the results. But it is worth noting that the other name that was flying around as someone who potentially would move against Kirstama was West Streeting, who served as Health Secretary. He has today said he would back Andy Burnham. So it does look like at the moment, there aren't really a lot of people who want to go against Andy Burnham.

That is because he's popular. A lot of people are worried about what it would look like for the party if they started having an open leadership contest while in government. You know, there's a lot of mudslinging. It's not great for the country. So it does look like it could be a coronation. That obviously has its own drawbacks. You will then get the question of legitimacy. Nobody voted.

You know, the public did not vote for this man to be prime minister. So either way, there are problems for Andy Burnham and for the process. But as we speak now at the minute, does look like he could be our next prime minister very soon. You did a bit of this before, but just how much. Help me understand a bit more how things soured so much for Kier Sturmer. Like a U-Gub poll last month reported 69% of people disapproved of him. That's an enormous number. This is a guy who won in a landslide in 2024.

So, like, you know, what are the big beats to help people understand? Yeah. So I think this is going to be a question that there will be a lot of debate on. And I think ultimately a lot of people will conclude that, some of this intense dislike towards Kirstama, is probably slightly unjustified. There has been a catalogue of errors that this government have made from the very start.

And actually, you could argue even before they got elected, their manifesto was so cautious. They ruled out any kind of tax rises or working people. I want taxes to come down for working people. They've been really clobbered time and time again. Now, that is a vote winner, but is it going to win you favours in government when public services are really,

struggling and people expect more from their public services. So they already tied themselves into a not with that. And then there were just lots of issues with Kirstalmers communication. So one of the first policies this government announced was that they were going to take winter fuel payments away from pensioners. Now this is a blanket payment that all pensioners in the UK receive. It just went down very, very badly, as you can imagine. It was exactly the sort of thing people thought a centre-left government should not be doing. They also refused initially to withdraw the two-child benefit cap, which is a particular welfare measure that means people with more than two children stop receiving a certain amount of benefit. Again, MPs in the party

felt that this wasn't something that the Labour government should be holding on to. There were a number of U-turned, so eventually they U-turned on winter fuel, they u-turned on the two-child benefit cap, but not having, not without having already punished MPs in the party for voting against the government on certain things. There was also an enormous backbench rebellion over welfare reform. Those government plans, though, have hit a major hurdle, an amendment to effectively block the bill signed by more than 120 Labour MPs. This government under Kirstama has consistently pivoted to the right on social issues like immigration or trans rights. Today we publish a white paper on immigration, a strategy absolutely central to my plan for change, that will finally take back control of our borders. and close the book on a squalid chapter for our politics, our economy and our country.

And that is the sort of thing that has isolated quite a lot of their core vote. And then, of course, you have this insurgent right-wing party, which is Reform UK, which has been nibbling at some of the Labour vote in the heartland. So basically, Labour has been alienating its voters on the left and losing its voters on the right. And that's when you have MPs really panicking about what. whether they're going to keep their seats at the next election. And then it all came to a head when the Prime Minister appointed Peter Mandelson as his ambassador in the US,

even though he knew about his links to Geoffrey Epstein. And that became the thing that just started to really destroy Kirstama's support across the country and in his party. It was this question of how good is this man's judgment if he knew about this relationship, but he still thought he was worth having as his ambassador? Right, right. And just for people listening, there's now a criminal investigation, right, into these allegations of misconduct. Mandelson is essentially being accused of leaking sensitive info to EPSY back in 2009, 2010, right?

With Sturmer's resignation, that's now six different prime ministers for the UK in the last 10 years. There could be seven soon. three of them were just in one year, 2022. It's a really pretty remarkable turnover rate for the top job in the country. You know, not to brag here in Canada. We've had two. We've had two in that time. Yeah.

Because we're guys. I guess so. I don't know. But of course this has led to a lot of commentary, as you know, on whether Britain itself is ungovernable. And I just like, what do you think of that? Like, what do you make of this, that notion? So I think it's certainly an interesting question. Do I think Britain is ungovernable? No. Do I think it requires a leader who is prepared to be brave and make difficult decisions that might not necessarily be popular but will pay off in the long term? Yes. I think if you look at a lot of the issues this country faces, you know, we had 14 years of austerity under conservative. governments, which basically hollowed out our public services. We had a successive governments that refused to invest while borrowing rates were really low. And then we left the EU. Brexit did a

huge amount of damage to our economy. And actually on the 23rd of June, tomorrow, as we're recording, that is the 10-year anniversary since Britain voted to leave the EU. It's remarkable that another Prime Minister has left within one day of this anniversary, because actually if you look at those prime ministers who have gone over the past 10 years, all of their departures have been related to Brexit in some way. The damage that that is still continuing to do to the UK, not just its economy, but how it's changed our conversations about national identity, our place in the world, how we relate to one another. You know, that is a whole podcast in itself. It's really fascinating. But I think, yeah, this idea of governability, there are so many issues facing.

any prime minister, not just our poor economic outlook, not just the bond markets and how they react to political decisions, which makes governments very risk-averse to their kind of tax and spend plans. But also, you know, as you are in Canada, social media had put so much pressure on governments to respond much faster and much quicker. And it doesn't really allow politicians to prioritise that long-term, boring decisions. making that needs to happen for countries to be prosperous. And also in this country, you know, we have a really powerful media ecosystem that is tilted to the right and has been very, very critical of prime ministers and has also been

very keen and, you know, loves to write about and publicize political news. So that appetite for sort of political drama has been really pressing. And I say that as someone who has been a reporter in Parliament, you know, I've reported on politics for quite a long time now. There is a real desire for trying to make it dramatic and exciting and sexy. And I think that makes it very difficult for serious policymakers to grapple with the deep, less interesting parts of this country. Shopping for a car should be exciting, not exhausting.

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With Google AI, Destination Canada is giving local businesses the insights they need to grow. Together, we're helping boost tourism from coast to coast to coast. Innovation is Canada's story. Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian innovation. You mentioned before that the right had really been kind of nibbling at the left's voter base. And just like tell me more about how that's been happening. Yeah, so we have the rise of reform UK here, which is this kind of insurgent right wing party, populist right wing party, headed up by Nigel Farage, who again, your listeners may know.

He was very much kind of the architect, one of the key faces of the Brexit campaign back in 2016, the vote leave campaign. He since has created his new political party reform UK, which he heads up. They have been capturing media attention. They are consistently topping the polls at around sort of 25 to 30% of the vote. And that's key because that's less than one in three voters. It's not an overwhelming majority, but they've definitely been capturing attention. And, you know, Nigel Farage is one of those figures where people, People love to talk about him and know what he's doing.

And this particular Labour government under Kirstama have been really desperate to try and win back some of those voters they're losing in these kind of traditional Labour heartlands. Often parts of the country in sort of the North and the Midlands that are deindustrialised, you know, they might be slightly poorer, where they're seeing that loss of votes, that sort of traditional Labour vote going to reform. Now, having said that, actually the evidence is that Labor are losing far more votes on its. left flank to other parties like the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party. But this particular Labour government under Kirstehr Stama and his former advisors, particularly his advisor Morgan McSweeney, just were very much focused on these, they kind of called them hero voters, these voters in these Labour heartlands that they want to win back.

They were really pushing on anti-immigration policies, nothing too radical on tax and spend, really trying to win back those voters that sit more on the right. But obviously that has done the immense damage on the left as well. And just, you mentioned before, the cost of living issues. Like just how pressing is that for people right now? I think that really is the key issue. If you ask voters in the UK what their priorities are, it is cost of living or immigration.

But often if you drill into why people care about immigration so much and, you know, it's a very complex issue. But immigration numbers now are coming down quite rapidly in the UK. We had this very visceral issue of the small boats issue. So after we left the EU, we got more and more irregular migrants coming over on dinghies. And obviously you can imagine those photos, they're very visceral. People really saw them and felt, oh, we can't protect our borders. This is getting out of control.

So immigration has been a really live issue. But if you ask voters why they care about immigration, it's a fairness issue. They feel like they're working really hard and not getting the pay that they thought they'd get or the life they thought they'd get. And then they see pictures of people coming over to the UK and they think that's not fair. So really, when you drill into it a lot of the time, it's also an economic issue as well. And here in the UK, we've had stagnant wages. We've had really rapidly rising house prices. You have a whole generation of young people locked out.

We have more and more people on sickness benefits because work doesn't pay. very well for a lot of people. And we've got into a sort of ridiculous situation now where for a lot of people, it actually is more cost-effective to be on disability benefits than it would be to be in work because their work won't implement disability-friendly procedures. And there's just a whole mess of things going on with our economy that means that people are feeling really hard done by. And of course, when you add in Brexit, the increased cost that's put on businesses, leaving, you know, the single market, all of it has ended up to this picture where there is this real economic mess. And every time the Chancellor has tried to fiddle with various levers to try and give herself

more headroom, it's been wiped out by whatever is happening in Iran or the Middle East or any geopolitical issue. So it's been very, very difficult for this government to generate any growth that is actually being felt by people. And, you know, inflation keeps going up. People keep feeling the cost of living, housing costs, that has created a very unhappy, discontented electorate that feels like it's working harder for less. You know, let's say Andy Burnham becomes prime minister, like there's no real challengers. Like, what happens next? Is he going to then take a stab at governing? Or will he call an election? And suddenly are we looking?

at like a potential Nigel Farage Prime Minister, you know, in 2027? Like, how could this? Yeah, so these are the really interesting questions because on the one hand,

Andy Burnham might become Prime Minister and he might say, I'm not going to do anything that wasn't already in the manifesto. So therefore, we don't need a general election.

But then you could kind of say, well, what's the point? Yes, he might be a better communicator than Kirstama. But as I've just laid out, a lot of these issues are far deeper than Kirstalmers' communication style. You actually need a leader who's going to do some radical things, whether it's to tax and spend or whatever,

to try and get people feeling happier and better off. Or he might say, actually, I do want to do something radical. I want to put up taxes or I want to borrow more. In which case, you're going to get a lot of criticism from people saying, well, you need to hold a general election because people didn't vote for that. You don't have a mandate. So that becomes very difficult.

Now, if there's a general election in six months' time, the question of would reform get in is a really interesting one. They do consistently perform well in the polls. But actually, we've had three by-elections here in the UK where they've been actual specific constituencies have needed to vote for a new MP. Reform have put everything they can into these three by-elections and not once have they got close to winning.

And they've all been slightly different. They've all been target seats. There are reasons why reform could have won there. But actually, what I think you're seeing is the coalition of voters who want to stop reform is larger than those who do want to vote reform in. So, yes, reform could do well. There's definitely still a path to number 10 for Nigel Farage, especially if that vote on the left is split. You know, reform get through the middle. But I don't think it's as simple as Nigel Farage has got this zone up and he's heading to Downing Street.

And I think the optimism in the Labour Party is if they can just give voters who were, you know, who are departing, labor, whether to go to the Greens or Reform, a reason to trust the party could say we've got a new figurehead, we've got something, just trust us, stay with us, we'll take you on this journey better than the previous leader did. They might be able to keep enough of that support to keep Nigel Farage out. But it's a very risky game. You know, Zoe, I'm curious, like, all of this political instability and drama, what is it done to political engagement? You know, I know in the last election in 2024, you guys had the lowest voter turnout in 20 years, right? And like, how is this all impacting how people are engaging with

politics? So people are really fed up. You're right. Turnout is historically really low. People talk about disengaging. And actually, a lot of the support for Reform UK is driven by these voters who just want to kick the establishment. There's been some really interesting polling done because obviously reform is a right. It's a, you know, It's a pretty hard right party. It's got very right-wing views on immigration, you know, withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, things like that, things that are quite alarming to a lot of voters.

If you drill into reform support, there's actually a real split as to whether voters who are supporting reforms support those specific policies. Actually, a lot of it is driven by this idea of, I just kind of want to vote for a party that's going to tear everything down because that's how unhappy I am. And I think a lot of voters are not happy with Kirstama, but they're also very distressed about the idea that we are changing prime ministers again.

And I think there is this real feeling that something is broken here and nobody really knows how to fix it. And I think it's interesting that increasingly there are conversations about maybe the answer is something like constitutional reform, electoral reform, where you'd make people feel, feel like if you change the voting system, their vote will have more of a say. And that was quite a sort of niche conversation about 10 years ago. First past the post, which we have as our voting system, is supposed to produce stable governments. It clearly isn't doing that. So I wonder,

well, you know, my prediction would be more and more as we get this increasingly unhappy electorate, as we get leaders increasingly struggle to get anything through, even with a mandate. Do we actually have to look at how the system works, how we vote people in, how we show, share power, how we make voters feel like they're a part of the system. But, you know, without that, I think it's very, very difficult. Trust feels broken. People feel disillusioned. They feel like things are getting worse. You know, just take immigration as an example. Immigration numbers are coming down. Most voters still think immigration numbers are going up. People just don't trust in the system. And I think that is a very difficult job for any leader, especially one who will come in

without a mandate from the public. That was really interesting. Zoe, thank you so much for this. It is such a pleasure always to have you on. Thank you so much. All right. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.