Unlike one of his recent predecessors, Keir Starmer lasted considerably longer than a head of lettuce. Still, his tenure as prime minister can still be judged a major disappointment. Just two years ago, the Labour Party won a resounding (if not entirely convincing) victory after 14 years of Conservative rule. Starmer was supposed to be a grounding force after a dizzying succession of short-lived Tory prime ministers, but his time in office quickly became marked both by indecisiveness and poor judgment. With Starmer flailing on almost every front — the economy, health care, Jeffrey Epstein-adjacent scandal — and three years before another mandatory general election, the party more or less collectively decided to toss Starmer overboard and try their luck with a new leader: Andy Burnham, a veteran Labour lawmaker and cabinet member who served as mayor of Greater Manchester for almost a decade. After some electoral maneuvering, Starmer announced his resignation in June, and Burnham could take the reins as soon as next week.

Burnham is more of a populist than Starmer, perhaps a better match for anti-establishment times. More importantly, he is a talented communicator and possesses a political skill Starmer lacks: charisma. The question is whether Burnham — or anyone — can effectively govern a country that has lurched from crisis to crisis for more than a decade, and which is contending with sluggish economic growth, a newly shaky relationship with its oldest ally, and the long hangover from the disaster that was Brexit. For some perspective on that question, I rang up Stephen Bush, a prolific political commentator who is a columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times.

Back when Keir Starmer was merely on the rocks and not finished yet, I spoke with Cambridge professor Helen Thompson about how the U.K. has seemed basically ungovernable over the last few years — really, since Brexit in 2016. Andy Burnham is charismatic and a more deft politician than Starmer, but he’ll still have huge structural problems to deal with. Why should he be better able to solve them than his predecessors were?It’s a good question. In some way, it’s the classic story: the best way to succeed in your job is for your predecessor to have been successful. There’s a reason why good leaders tend to go and come in sequence. Obviously we had the financial crisis, and financial services is and was a huge part of our economy. That’s made so many trade-offs in decisions in British politics much harder. As a result of that, we had six years of public spending cuts. We then had the EU referendum against the backdrop of that, and we’ve cycled through prime ministers since. So can Andy Burnham turn that around? As you say, he is a more deft politician than Keir Starmer, which you would assume would help at the margins. But I don’t think the United Kingdom is going to be able to turn around any of its problems until a political leader emerges who is both able to articulate what has gone wrong for the country over the last two decades and successfully persuade the public of his or her chosen methods to get out of it.

For the moment, much of Burnham’s appeal seems to be just that he’s not Starmer. He’s also got a reputation as a bit of a shape-shifter. Is he offering much in the way of specific solutions, or even an ability to diagnose the problem?Andy Burnham’s big point of differentiation is that he thinks we’re far too over-centralized as a country. The average mayor or council leader here has essentially no real powers, and is entirely dependent on the central government if they want to build something or deregulate something. His argument is that this helps cause slower economic growth than we ideally should have. Burnham’s plan would be a fairly substantial change in terms of how we’re governed, and would be quite different compared to how we’ve been run in recent decades — Starmer did oversee a limited reorganization of local government, but it was not particularly joined up and there was clearly no big overarching thought behind it.

But is that a program that can deliver meaningful changes in the United Kingdom’s economic products or the performance of its public services within the next three years, when the next election has to be held by? It doesn’t seem particularly likely. And although it is a significant idea that he has now been committed to for some time, whether it’s a significant idea of the kind that gets people excited again and causes them to reelect the Labour Party is far from a given.

Is he holding up decentralization as sort of the answer to everything and avoiding other major decisions, like spending cuts, because they’re too politically difficult?I would say the big picture problem of public policy in the United Kingdom is that when David Cameron was prime minister, he did two things. He slashed the amount of state spending and he slashed taxes for middle and lower earners. Fast forward 10 years and we have this slightly weird problem where the average person is unhappy with the level of state services they receive, but they’re also unhappy with the level of tax they pay. And we’re caught in this halfway house where we do not provide what you’d think of as a classically European level of state services while also not providing what you’d think of as a classically American level of low taxes.

It’s the worst of all worlds. And no politician wants to go, “Okay guys, so which one do you prefer? You’ve got........

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