AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
British prime minister Keir Starmer is fighting to save his job. If he's ousted by his own Labour Party, his successor will become the seventh prime minister in just 10 years. Joining us now to discuss what that says about the state of U.K. politics is Rafael Behr. He's a political columnist at The Guardian. Thanks for being here.
RAFAEL BEHR: Oh, hi. It's a pleasure to join you.
RASCOE: So why is Prime Minister Starmer so unpopular with his own party at this point? I mean, it was just two years ago that Labour won a general election in a landslide.
BEHR: Well, he's unpopular with his party primarily because he's unpopular with the country. That landslide victory was absolutely huge, but it was premised on an offer of change. Change was really the only word in the manifesto. A lot of people feel nothing in particular has changed. They're in - the country's in the same sort of malaise that it was before. People are very disappointed. They blame Keir Starmer. They feel that Labour have just turned out to be just another bunch of politicians, much like the Tories.
And we had local and devolved Parliamentary elections last week that really confirmed what Labour MPs have been fearing for a long time, which is that if they fight a general election with Keir Starmer as their leader, they're going to get absolutely hammered. I mean, they lost a lot of council seats. They lost power in regions where they've had power for a very long time. And so at the basic level, the Labour Party realizes something has to change, and their leader is the most efficient way of getting a second audition with the country. They are disappointed also with the lack of change, and they feel the government's been directionless.
RASCOE: Well, do you think that he'll be ousted? And if so, how would that play out?
BEHR: Well, the way things seem to be evolving at the moment is - and I don't want to get too into the weeds of the Labour Party's internal mechanism for choosing leaders. But Keir Starmer, if he decides he wants to stay on - it's quite hard for them to dislodge him. They have to have a challenge. They have to have a fight. It could be really bloody and brutal. And that's quite difficult.
So at the moment, it's largely about making him understand that really it's over. He can't just cling on by his fingernails and that maybe he could find some way to step down with his dignity intact and allow for an orderly transition. In practice, he is very stubborn. He's very proud. He's got a strong sense of public duty, and he thinks he should and can carry on. So we're in a bit of a deadlock at the moment, where there are lots of people who want to be leader of the Labour Party. It's very hard for them to get there while he's still in Downing Street. And he's saying he's not going anywhere.
RASCOE: What do you think this moment says about politics in the U.K.? Like, is the country becoming ungovernable?
BEHR: It certainly feels that way, and I think it's particularly poignant because that campaign that Keir Starmer fought two years ago, he said very explicitly, a vote for Labour is a vote to end the chaos. So we'd had the Conservative Party. They'd been in power for 14 years. By the end of their reign, it really was falling apart, changes of prime minister all the time. Liz Truss lasted barely more than 40 days. It just felt like the Tories were indulging in internal factional psychodrama all the time and not paying attention to actually governing the country.
And for Labour two years later, after that big victory on that exact premise of not replicating that, to be in the same situation, you start to feel that, yes, there must be something structural about the way British politics works and about the job of being a prime minister at this particular moment in time. It can't just be a coincidence, I think.
RASCOE: We're also seeing the rise of populist politicians in many countries, and that applies to Europe, as well. What do you think will be the consequences of this type of politics?
BEHR: Well that's exactly the issue we have here in the UK. You've got Nigel Farage waiting in the wings of Reform U.K. Party but best known to people as really the ideological godfather of the whole Brexit movement. And for him, there's this sense of equivalence of parity between Labour and Conservative, that the Labour promise changed. They come in. They look the same. You've got a lot of people looking at the established mainstream parties that have always dominated the center of British politics proving incapable of enacting any sufficient change that people really feel, certainly in their pockets.
And he can say - and he can fight a general election campaign saying, look at these guys. You've tried it their way. It never works. Let's really do something different. Effectively, let's just burn everything down and start again. So I think more broadly, what that means about the U.K.'s place in the world is that we're all slightly still downstream of that moment in 2016, that Brexit referendum, when the country made a huge strategic and economic and political decision to change direction without really debating the consequences of that properly.
I mean, it was a moment of anger and spasm for the people who voted for it. As a result, the U.K. is kind of strategically adrift in the world. It's detached itself from Europe. It's struggling to get a stable relationship with Donald Trump's administration in the U.S. And the U.K. hasn't really had a proper conversation with itself about the kind of country it wants to be and how it fits into this volatile world. And that is going to be effectively the core of the next general election campaign.
RASCOE: That's Rafael Behr, a political columnist at The Guardian. Thank you so much for joining us.
BEHR: It was a pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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