This is not democracy. This is farce. The constant roundabout of Prime Ministers, backstabbers, stalking horses and pretenders to the throne has made a mockery of British politics.
After a 48-hour battle to save his job, Keir Starmer is clinging on – but you can be sure he won't last for long.
The British Government has begun to look chaotic, changing leaders with alarming frequency. If Starmer is replaced before July, we will have cycled through seven prime ministers in a decade: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer. The last four have held office in the last four years alone.
Four heads of government, and just one General Election. How can that possibly represent the will of the people? How can anyone expect economic prosperity and social stability when there is constant uncertainty at the top?
We have to put an end to it. If Starmer goes, as I believe he inevitably soon will, Britain must have an immediate General Election. Anything less risks undermining a democratic tradition that stretches back almost 340 years, to the Bill of Rights in 1689.
And then we need a new rule: no more chopping and changing. No government should be permitted to replace its prime minister, except in genuinely exceptional circumstances, such as serious ill-health. If the leader of the party chosen to rule by the electorate is fit to govern, he or she must stay in power – or the country should go back to the polls.
This principle must apply to every party, including my own. I'm the honorary treasurer of Reform UK, and I believe we will form the next government, whenever the next General Election is held. But I should stress this is my personal opinion, not part of the Reform manifesto – though my colleagues, including party leader Nigel Farage, are well aware of my views. And many, I suspect, will agree with me.
Since David Cameron stepped down in 2016 following the Brexit vote, the battle for the top job has increasingly resembled a perpetual leadership contest, played out in public. This created the clear impression of instability and severely weakens confidence in government.
No prime minister can establish authority when they are constantly looking over their shoulder. That's especially true of Starmer, who even with the biggest landslide majority of the 21st century has struggled to get his own way. Policies are announced, then watered down or dropped altogether under pressure from within his own ranks.
Last year he attempted to introduce welfare reforms aimed at reducing the humongous benefits bill by about £5 billion a year. But he was forced into a humiliating U-turn by a backbench mutiny, stoked from within his own Cabinet.
If a prime minister with that level of power cannot push through his agenda, something is clearly broken.
The reality is that some of Starmer's senior figures have never looked fully settled behind him. The jockeying has been there from the start – and the weakness of the current system allows it to flourish.
Angela Rayner was never going to be content with the office of Deputy Prime Minister, as long as she thought she could barge her way to the top rung of the ladder. Now she is disloyally trying to promote her ally on the hard-Left, Andy Burnham, who is not even an MP.
Burnham was elected to be Mayor of Manchester, a serious job in its own right. Yet the fact that his name is constantly floated for Westminster tells you everything about the permanent leadership game being played at the top of British politics.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, is also calculating his chances of success. So is Ed Miliband, who has already lost one General Election as Labour leader in 2015. Miliband remains fixated on his Net Zero delusion, which threatens to plunge the country into a nightmare of energy insecurity, with power cuts and a winter of blackouts – at a time when the UK already has some of the highest energy costs in Europe.
Burnham and Rayner, meanwhile, are full-on socialists who will crash the economy, bankrupt the government, obliterate the middle classes and paralyse the NHS.
Whoever takes over from Starmer will have a radically different style. And that's not what the country voted for. Voters backed a government led by Keir Starmer. If Labour MPs now want someone else in No 10, the public should have their say.
But, of course, Britain has suffered this farrago repeatedly over the past two decades. In 2007, Gordon Brown became prime minister after Tony Blair stepped down without a General Election.
More recently, in 2022, the country moved from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss, then to Rishi Sunak, all within a matter of months and without voters having any say in the changes. Before that, Theresa May replaced David Cameron after the Brexit referendum, again without a national vote. In each case, the public was effectively told to accept a new national leader chosen through an internal party process.
We need safeguards to prevent this constant churn and restore a basic democratic principle: that the authority to govern comes from the people, not through internal politicking.
One simple rule would go a long way. A prime minister should remain in place unless forced to step down by genuine incapacity, as Sir Winston Churchill did in 1955. And even then, such a transfer of power should happen no more than once during a parliamentary term.
Beyond that, if a party wants to install a new leader as prime minister, it should go back to the country and back to the polls.
Otherwise, the consequences will not just be political – they will be economic. If it continues, we will be heading for economic meltdown on a scale that will make the 2008 banking crisis look like an accounting error.
Britain cannot expect to attract long-term investment if it cannot offer basic political stability. Investors and international partners need clarity about who is in charge and what direction the country is heading in.
While we lurch from one leadership crisis to another, Gulf states are deploying enormous amounts of capital into countries seen as more stable and strategically aligned. The UAE alone recently committed $40 billion (£30 billion) of investment into Italy, across AI, infrastructure and energy projects, while Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund continues to deploy tens of billions globally.
The Qatar Investment Authority, the Gulf State's sovereign wealth fund, has long been one of the UK's largest investors – but like all global capital, it is increasingly selective about where it allocates funds. Like many investors, it recoils from instability.
I have never had any confidence in Starmer, and I certainly didn't vote Labour in 2024. But we all abide by the fundamental democratic principle that the party with a majority governs. What we are now seeing risks undermining that principle.
The British public deserve better than a revolving door of prime ministers chosen without their consent.
If politicians want to change the prime minister, they should have the courage to put that decision back to the people. Anything less is not democracy.
