Is It Harder Than Ever to Be Prime Minister?

Is it harder than ever to be prime minister? The numbers alone suggest something has gone badly wrong in British politics. Five prime ministers in seven years. Not one served a full parliament. Over the same stretch, the country burned through seven foreign secretaries, six chancellors of the exchequer, and four cabinet secretaries. That is not normal turnover. That is a revolving door spinning off its hinges.

Sir Keir Starmer, the current occupant of No 10, holds a parliamentary majority larger than the one Clement Attlee won in 1945. Yet even he faces murmurs of removal from his own side, a plot twist that feels almost routine now. So the question lingers. Is Britain becoming ungovernable?

Is it harder than ever to be prime minister?

Starmer himself rejects the idea. At a news conference this week, he said flatly: "No, I don't think Britain is ungovernable." Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, echoed him in the Commons. "Britain is not ungovernable," she said. But both lead MPs who have developed, in recent years, a taste for political regicide. Both must govern through a thicket of regulations, consultations, and arm's length bodies that can turn pulling a lever into an endurance sport. And both face voters who seem increasingly unwilling to hear that politics involves trade offs.

Five Leaders in Seven Years

Part of the answer may be that events have been unusually brutal. The 2008 financial crash. The chaos of Brexit. The economic hammer of Covid-19. The war in Ukraine and the energy shock that followed. And now the systemic disruption of Donald Trump's second presidency. These are not uniquely British problems. Incumbent governments across Europe have wobbled under similar headwinds.

But that framing misses something. Other countries have faced the same storms without cycling through leaders at this pace. Hannah White, CEO of the Institute for Government, put it bluntly: "The UK is not 'ungovernable'. But its political parties have handed the country a series of prime ministers lacking in key leadership skills at a time when crises have hit thick and fast."

What the experts say

Professor Anand Menon, director of the UK in a Changing Europe think tank, pointed to a failure of leadership rather than a structural collapse. "Our system provides substantial power to a government with a majority," he said. "That this majority has not been deployed to date is a failure of leadership." Sir Anthony Seldon, the historian and biographer of multiple prime ministers, was even sharper. He argued that recent incumbents like Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Sir Keir lacked the political abilities for the job and the humility to seek help. "They didn't have the skills and weren't willing to bring people in," Seldon said. "Past prime ministers had mentors. Even Margaret Thatcher had Willie Whitelaw."

A System Full of Grit

But the leadership deficit is only one strand of the story. There is also the machine itself. Baroness Cavendish, former head of David Cameron's policy unit, told the BBC that every government arrives astonished at how difficult it is to get anything done. Some Labour ministers, she said, have privately admitted they might agree with Dominic Cummings about parts of the civil service needing reform.

Starmer himself has voiced the frustration. In a frank admission before the House of Commons Liaison Committee last December, he said: "My experience as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm's length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be.

"The contempt for the civil service, now amply reciprocated, has left the means by which politicians implement their policy frightened and wary."

That was one Whitehall veteran, speaking privately. He added that politicians are "increasingly like children. Agog and overawed at winning office and too frightened to do anything with it once they are there."

Drama addiction

Then there is the tempo of modern politics. Social media has collapsed the time available for deliberation. Theo Bertram, former adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, described a structural problem: all the things needed to fix the country will take a decade, but a prime minister does not have a decade. In the age of social media, short-termism reigns.

Steve Baker explained it. He's the former Tory MP and architect of Brexit rebellions who explained how the mechanics work now. But whips and ministers arrive too late to a conversation that social media concluded an hour ago, he wrote. So the same mechanisms are now deployed inside Labour, with mini power centres built around WhatsApp lists organising against their own leader in days, not months.

Nick Bryant, the political commentator and former BBC colleague, argued that the 'drama addiction among both politicians and the political reporters who cover them' fuels a constant cycle of chaos that is democratically destabilising. And it's destabilising.

The Expectations Gap

Here is the part the press release skipped. Voters want quick answers to hard problems, and politicians have forgotten how to say no.

Politics as giant lobbying machine, not transmission mechanism for ideas.

The fiscal arithmetic makes this harder than it was. In the past, prime ministers could spend their way out of trouble. Leaders of the right cut taxes. Leaders of the left spent more on welfare. Both options are now less viable. Unfunded tax cuts spook the bond markets. Hints at easing fiscal rules to borrow more do the same. Yet the economy remains trapped in low growth, high debt, and stagnating real incomes.

What Comes Next

The public got accustomed to sweeping intervention during the pandemic and the Ukraine energy crisis. They struggle to understand why cost of living pressures remain unchecked. But money seriously constrains policy choices.

And it gets interesting. That prescription requires voters willing to accept hard trade-offs, parties ready to face difficult truths, and above all, prime ministers who survive long enough to implement what they promised. But that's a problem for everyone, not just the mice.

Is it harder than ever to be prime minister?

So is it harder than ever to be prime minister? The answer from the evidence is a qualified yes. Not because the job has changed beyond recognition, but because the conditions around it have. Leaders arrive with less experience. The civil service is demoralised and wary. Social media compresses decision time to nothing. Voters expect instant results. The fiscal room to buy patience has vanished. And the parties that produce prime ministers have normalised regicide.

None of this makes Britain ungovernable. But it does make governing brutally unforgiving. The gap between what voters expect and what prime ministers can deliver has never been wider. And nobody seems willing to say that out loud.