Published: 11:08 AM, 17 May 2026
Why British Premiers Can't Stay Long in Power
During last one decade Britain has changed its Prime Minister several times for different reasons. Collected
Keir Starmer has survived a political near-death experience. And he's just the latest British prime minister to look shaky in the job, reports POLITICO.
Less than two years after walking into No. 10 Downing Street, Britain's leader is already facing calls to quit from his own party - and embarking on yet another reset of his operation to try to turn things around.
His recent predecessors as prime minister may have some sympathy.
Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's sudden departure from No. 10 in 2016 after Britain's vote to leave the European Union triggered a period of unprecedented churn in British politics. None of his successors - Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak - served a full parliamentary term. Three were ousted from high office by their own side. It wasn't always this way: Prime ministers used to last.
Margaret Thatcher completed 11 years at the top, spending the whole of the 1980s in No. 10. Her successor John Major lasted six-and-a-half years, and Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair enjoyed more than a decade in power.
So what's going on? From acute cost-of-living pressures to a weak No. 10, POLITICO's Westminster Insider podcast asked historians and former political advisers why it now seems impossible for a British prime minister to last very long at the top. David Runciman is a political historian and host of the "Past, Present, Future" podcast. He believes Britain's instability is not unique - and is driven by a global cost-of-living squeeze.
"Incumbency is harder because the world is a harder place to govern," he says, pointing to the U.S., which has turfed presidents out after a single term in recent years. Runciman's prime culprit? Rising prices, which he describes as "the killer of governments."
"In the seventies, when inflation was rampant, no democratic government anywhere in the world survived," he points out.
Katie Perrior was Theresa May's director of communications between 2016 and 2019. May lasted fewer than three years in office after trying - and failing - to negotiate a Brexit deal with the European Union that she could also get the U.K. parliament to approve.
Perrior reckons Westminster's frenzied 24/7 media environment is largely to blame for making the U.K. "ungovernable."
No. 10 is ill-equipped for the demands of the modern media age, she says, and a government without a clear plan can very easily be blown off course. "You're just being dragged into 20, 30 different crises at once," Perrior warns.
