Keir Starmer is stepping down, and the chair is already being warmed up for Andy Burnham. In ten years the infernal machine of the British premiership has burned through six of them: one or two lasting about as long as a tub of yogurt, almost all of them incapable of saying anything memorable.

This is no longer a string of accidents: it’s an operating regime. And an operating regime “must” have an interpretation.
Here’s mine.

There was a time when the cycles of Britain’s heads of government ran long, because they rested on solid electoral blocs, anchored by deep roots to the interests of real majorities of citizens. That time is over. Today the prime minister doesn’t represent a bloc: he’s a fuse. And a fuse, by definition, is the component designed to burn out — it sacrifices itself so that the circuit upstream doesn’t blow.

Every new tenant of Downing Street brings the same thing as a dowry: a jolt of novelty, a horizon of expectations, just enough freshness to reabsorb, for a few months, the public’s disaffection with democracy and its institutions, and to keep the legitimacy of the office still relatively high. Then comes the real load — the structural problems no one can carry on volatile, here-today consent alone — and the fuse does exactly what it was fitted for: it blows. Next, please.

From which I infer that the circuit being protected is not so much the popular will as the powers that sit upstream of the switch. It should be said that this is not a purely English anomaly. Look at the continent: ex-Rothschild Macron (but how ex?), ex-BlackRock Merz (but how ex?). Prime ministers and presidents who are unpopular, expressions more of the opaque powers that prop them up than of the citizens who vote for them. They last a little longer, true — but that comes down to the different institutional architecture of their respective countries, not to a broader base of consent. The difference is one of engineering, not, therefore, of substance.

That is precisely why the wear and tear on display in London is the most spectacular of all. Where the institutional safeguards are thinner, the system burns through fuses in plain sight, in public, one after another. It’s the red warning light coming on across the panel: not a passing fault, but an enormous democratic crisis — one that the constant turnover of faces serves only to keep out of view.