On 22 June, Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister. Less than two years after Labour swept into power promising stability and competence, the man who lectured the country about "grown-up government" has walked away. And here is the part that should make every voter's blood boil: you will not get a say in who replaces him.
Labour's National Executive Committee will now set a timetable. Nominations open on 9 July. A new Prime Minister will be anointed before the summer recess. No ballot box. No campaign. No mandate. Just a backroom carve-up between the same people who got us here.
A Government That Collapsed From the Inside
This was not a sudden event. It was a slow-motion implosion that anyone paying attention could see coming. Health Secretary Wes Streeting walked out in May. In June, Defence Secretary John Healey and Armed Forces Minister Al Carns resigned in a row over defence spending. Cabinet ministers and Labour MPs spent months openly briefing against their own leader. A government cannot function when its own benches have lost faith in the man at the top.
What finally broke Starmer was not principle. It was panic. After Labour's catastrophic results in the May council elections and the relentless rise of Reform UK, his own MPs decided he was an electoral liability and forced him out. They did not remove him because the country was being governed badly. They removed him because they are frightened of losing their seats.
The Democratic Deficit Nobody Wants to Discuss
Let us be honest about what is happening. Britain has churned through Prime Minister after Prime Minister, several of them installed mid-term without the public being consulted. Now Labour is about to do exactly the same thing the Conservatives did with Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak: hand the keys to Downing Street to whoever wins an internal party contest.
The frontrunner is Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor who has just returned to Parliament after winning the Makerfield by-election with a majority of more than 9,000. A man who was not even an MP a month ago could be running the country by August. Whatever you think of him, no member of the public voted for him to be Prime Minister.
This is the rot at the heart of our politics. Power is treated as the private property of the parties, to be passed around at their convenience, while the people who actually pay the taxes and live with the consequences are treated as spectators.
What Reform UK Would Do
When a governing party changes its leader and therefore its direction, the country should be asked. Reform UK believes that a Prime Minister installed without a general election has no genuine mandate to push through major change. If Labour wants a fresh face and a fresh agenda, it should have the courage to put it to the British people.
The truth is that this crisis was never really about Keir Starmer. It is about a political class that has lost the trust of the public and is now reshuffling its own pack rather than facing the voters. The British people did not get the competent, stable government they were promised. They got chaos, resignations and a revolving door at Number 10. They deserve the final word, and that word is an election.