I’m writing a separate essay about this, so no long show notes today.
At first blush, Keir Starmer’s resignation is a Westminster murder mystery without a corpse. There was no scandal, no lurid disgrace, no unforgivable blunder: So why, exactly, is he resigning?
Ben Judah is the author of This Is Europe, This Is London, and Putin’s Fragile Empire. He was special adviser to Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy when he served as Starmer’s foreign secretary. (He’s Tim Judah’s son, if you’re wondering.) He joined us today to argue that Starmer’s fatal mistake was simply being too small for the historical moment.
When Trump was reelected—and as the costs of Brexit mounted—Starmer failed to seize the moment. He could have told Britain that the world had changed, and the old rules on defense, Europe, welfare, and taxation no longer applied.
But he didn’t.
We talk about Starmer’s fall, Andy Burnham’s rise, and the possibility that Britain is no longer suffering from a leadership crisis, but a re…
