Martin Ivens

When a prime minister has their back against the wall and runs out of positive arguments for their survival, they have one last recourse: Project Fear and the threat that the price of getting rid of them will be so stratospherically high that no one but a wrecker would consider it.

The best case for Andy Burnham to replace Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour party and therefore UK prime minister is made by the old Tory enemy. In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch fumed that Starmer’s rebellious MPs didn’t object to his policies: “They just want a better salesman.”

When the UK’s most charismatic postwar leader protests that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s failures aren’t due to “personality” or “a failure to communicate,” we should only half-believe him.

According to her housekeeper’s testimony, the New York hotel magnate Leona Helmsley’s policy on tax in the 1980s was “only the little people pay.” The courts found the so-called “Queen of Mean” guilty of federal tax evasion and the authorities ordered her sentence to begin on April 15 — for filing purposes, US Tax Day.

Three months ago Iran launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the UK-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Neither reached its target: A US destroyer shot down one and the other broke up in flight. Yet the strike blew an enormous hole in the credibility of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s grandiose foreign and security policy.

In March, ministers tried to reassure voters that the U.K. had everything it needed to defend the country. It wasn’t true and Healey knew it.

After a spectacular by-election victory in Makerfield that exceeded the pollsters’ most optimistic forecasts, Andy Burnham returns to London this week as the ruling Labour Party’s conquering hero. He has shown he can vanquish the threat from the right-wing populists of Reform UK, whereas other party candidates have failed to slow Nigel Farage’s momentum. The self-styled King of the North now moves to seize Keir Starmer’s crown.

No one ever went broke underestimating the survival skills of a UK prime minister. There have been six of them since 2016, each with their own often short and always inglorious tenure. Can Andy Burnham turn the tide? The critics say he is just a personable version of his robotic predecessor, Keir Starmer, who failed to restrain the Labour party’s profligate tax-and-spend habits. The best — and most difficult — way to prove them wrong would be to tackle welfare reform.

Everybody says the UK is a laughing stock. The economy is in the doldrums, the Royal Family has been besmirched by controversy and infighting and the country is about to have its seventh prime minister in 10 years. Britain, once a byword for political stability, has become an unserious country like Italy but without the good weather and the pasta, goes the argument. If only it were true.

Whenever there’s bad news, shoot the messenger. Last week Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, Britain’s hard-right populist party, found himself in an unlikely alliance with Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and second son of King Charles III. Both men share an animating passion: They blame the press or “the Establishment” for the wholly avoidable messes they have got themselves into.