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History Uncensored
Why Can’t 'Broken Britain' KEEP a Prime Minister? From Scandal to Assassination
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can't Britain keep a prime minister? The UK is now heading for its seventh leader in a decade. Keir Starmer won a landslide majority in July 2024, and less than two years later, he's announced his resignation. Not after losing an election, but after his own party decided he could no longer lead them. For a country that once liked to think of itself as politically stable, the mother of parliaments, the unwritten constitution, the smooth handover at Buckingham palace, this prime ministerial churn is becoming quite hard to explain away. Between 1979 and 2016, Britain had five prime ministers in 37 years. Since 2016, it's had six in roughly a decade. The obvious conclusion, often plastered over newspapers and social media, is Britain is broken. But history complicates that, because if you look at the full sweep of 300 years of this office, the picture becomes stranger and actually a lot more revealing. The idea of Britain's stately stability comes from its early leaders. Robert Walpole, the man most historians treat as Britain's first prime minister, held office for more than 20 years. William Pitt the Younger became prime minister at the precocious age of 24, younger than most people's first mortgage, and he served for almost 19. Lord Liverpool lasted nearly 15 years, and those are the names that can make British government look and feel ancient and unshakeable. But they are the exception, not the rule, because the period between 1827 and 1835, just eight years, saw seven different prime ministers. So by raw numbers, that is more volatile than anything that's happened since 2016. Look at the full history of Downing street and you find something else. Prime ministers lasting months, not years, governments collapsing, kings determining who got the job, caretaker ministries holding the fort just to keep the lights on while politicians negotiated who was actually going to be in charge, leaders dying in office and one being murdered. So here's a story that you probably weren't taught in history if you went to school in the uk. I did. And I wasn't taught this. At quarter past five on the afternoon of 11th May 1812, a thin faced man with strikingly angular features and an unusually large bulbous cranium, reportedly had spent the previous weeks sitting quietly in the public gallery of the House of Commons, watching through opera glasses, noting which ministers entered and when. And he took a seat near the fireplace in the lobby below. When the Prime Minister, Spencer Percival, walked through the door, he stood up, reached into a specially tailored pocket inside his coat, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest. Percival fell to the floor and his last words were either murder or oh, my God. By the time a surgeon arrived just minutes later, his pulse had stopped. The killer was John Bellingham, a merchant falsely imprisoned for debt in Russia who'd petitioned the British government for compensation and been ignored every time. Modern historians and psychiatrists who look into this believe that he suffered from a delusional disorder, consumed by an unshakeable conviction that the government was conspiring against him personally. The jury took under 50 minutes to find him guilty and he was hanged less than a week after Percival's funeral. Now, let me tell you about George Canning. Before Liz Truss took the infamous biscuit in 2022, Canning held the record for the shortest prime ministerial tenure in British history. He took office in April 1827. A brillian, sharp tongued Foreign secretary, he spent years outmanoeuvring his rivals to finally reach that top job. And then he died of pneumonia in August, just 119 days after. Then came Viscount Goderich, who stumbled into the job after Canning's death in the autumn of 1827 and lasted just a few months. His government was weak, divided and vulnerable to royal interference. In a political world, of course, where the monarchs still exercise real power over who governed. King George IV, who spent much of the 1820s actively meddling in the formation of governments, played a significant role in making Goderich's position untenable, all to say, before the Great Reform act of 1832, which was the law that began transforming Britain into something resembling a real modern democracy. A Prime Minister's tenure could end not because Parliament had lost confidence in him, but because the King preferred someone else. And then there's the duke of Wellington's 23 day premiership of 1834, which was not really a premiership at all. So Wellington, the General, who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and became the most celebrated man in Britain, had already served as prime minister once, from 1828 to 1830. So the second stint was something different entirely. King William IV had dismissed the sitting government and asked Wellington to form one. Wellington declined recommending Robert Peel instead. But Peel was sunning himself in Sardinia, so Wellington stepped in as a caretaker, running a government without a Cabinet. Or rather, he was the one man Cabinet until Peel could make the journey home. And that's why Liz Truss's 49 days are still counted as the shortest legitimate Prime Ministership in British history. Wellington's stint was a placeholder, not a government. Now, as you can see, Britain has had churn before, but historically that churn came from death, illness, royal interference, caretaker arrangements and the realities of a pre democratic political world. Today's turn comes from something else entirely. David Cameron resigned in 2016 because he called a referendum and lost it. Theresa May resigned in 2019 because Brexit created this contradiction that she couldn't solve. The public had voted to leave the European Union, but Parliament couldn't agree on what leaving actually meant. Boris Johnson resigned in 2022 because personal authority, corroded by scandal and a wave of ministerial resignations, reached the point where his own party decided that their biggest electoral asset had become the source of their political peril. Britain's shortest serving Prime Minister that we just mentioned, Liz Truss, was next to resign in 2022 because her mini budget tanked the market so badly that the bank of England had to intervene to protect financial stability. Rishi Sunak lost a general election in 2024, which was the most conventional and cleanest exit in this sequence. And then Keir Starmer has fallen in 2026, the way that modern British Prime Ministers tend to not at the ballot box, but when enough of their own MPs have decided that they've become a liability and they say so publicly. So that's six departures with six different triggers, none of them illness, assassination or a caretaker arrangement like before. So what's behind this? A new kind of chaos. One historic shift behind this is what political scientists call presidentialisation of UK politics. The argument is that Prime Ministers have increasingly accrued the institutional and political characteristics of an executive. Dominating the media, personalising elections, concentrating power at the centre, while they remain constitutionally dependent on a parliamentary party that can remove them like that at any time. So what this means is there is now a structural contradiction built into the job. The Prime Minister is marketed to the public as a quasi presidential figure. Of course, the monarch has executive power like before. The Prime Minister is blamed and celebrated like a President and expected to embody the national will, but can also be removed by a third or a quarter of their own MPs when their personal authority drains away. And in the age of Rolling news, instant polls and WhatsApp group rebellions. Personal brand failure happens so much faster than it ever did before. The second structural shift beneath runs deeper than any individual leader. And that's because Britain has entered an unprecedented era of multi party politics. The old two party system, in which governments won these large majorities with a big vote share and they could rely on stable coalitions for about five years, seems to have fragmented beyond recognition. In 2024, one in every five parliamentary seats was a marginal. That's more than double the number of marginals in 2019. And that means that the winning candidate often scrapes through by a small enough margin that a relatively modest swing in votes could just flip it to somebody else. And what that creates is a House of Commons that's full of MPs who feel permanently one bad headline away from losing their jobs, which makes loyalty to any leader considerably harder to sustain. First past the post makes this even more treacherous, not less, because Britain's electoral system, in which the candidate with the most votes in each local constituency wins regardless of what's happening nationally, can convert quite a modest overall vote share into a commanding majority in the House of Commons. It creates governments that can look overwhelming in Parliament while resting on shallow foundations in the country. Brexit sits underneath all of this like a geological fault. Britain's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, the trading and political bloc it had been a member of since 1973, cracked open the old party coalitions, the economic model and Britain's national identity in a single explosive question that neither major party's internal coalition could contain. David Cameron thought a referendum would settle Europe inside the Conservative Party. And instead the referendum consumed the premierships that followed. And those fractures that it opened haven't closed. They've just taken different forms in different governments. So is Britain broken? Doomed to a conveyor belt of prime ministers, each one arriving in Downing street already halfway to the exit? Not exactly. Parliament can still do what it was designed to do, and that's remove a Prime Minister who can no longer command authority without the state itself stopping. That's not a constitutional accident. It is the point of the parliamentary system, because unlike fixed presidential terms, Britain is not trapped with a leader who's lost power but still holds office. And Britain has survived far worse than Chern assassination, royal interference, factional collapses, systemic strain is not some modern invention. But history also shows that Britain's constitution has never been static. It's always evolved under pressure. The question now is whether an uncodified system, because that's what Britain's is, and it's built on convention, precedent, and assumption, rather than like a single written rulebook or constitution, whether that can adapt quickly enough to a political landscape that's moving faster than it ever has before. Thanks for watching History Uncensored. This is where we dig into the history behind the headlines, and I'll see you soon.
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