Keir Starmer is exiting as British PM, but while Charlie, on today’s edition of The Editors, says “that Keir Starmer was a particularly bad prime minister,” he doesn’t believe that “the problems that face Britain were the product of Keir Starmer’s incompetence or even of his party’s incompetence.”

“The British public,” says Charlie, “is not ungovernable in a systemic sense, but is practically ungovernable because it wants a whole host of policies that are both contradictory and aren’t working. . . . Britain has not grown much since 2008. . . . Productivity has been flat. Wages have stagnated. Relative to the United States, Britain has become much, much poorer.”

Charlie says, “Within a generation, Britain has gone from being a world power. Britain has gone from being a center of finance. Britain has gone from being a cultural force to being . . . what exactly?” Charlie doesn’t blame Starmer for this. Instead, he points out “that the British public is simultaneously aware that things are awry on their island and completely unwilling to do anything about it,” and cites as examples their lack of innovation, their attachment to net zero, and their inability to project power as a country.

“I see Keir Starmer as being one in a long line of prime ministers who, while inadequate in their own right, didn’t really have a chance because their mandate had been handed to them by people who had set them up to fail.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.