Politics by Numbers is a new series for The Journal where broadcaster, author and spreadsheet stan Gavan Reilly takes a data deep dive into a political point of the week. 

THE PREMISE of this column is that I take a data point and use it to tell a story, or raise a question about the way we’re all going. When it comes to the departure of Keir Starmer as Britain’s Prime Minister there are a few stats you could throw out – some of which any reader of The Journal will be familiar with.

There’s the slightly bonkers headline figure that the UK is about to have its seventh prime minister in a little over a decade. There are a few ancillary stats to this too: the fact that those seven PMs will have a combined tenure of 16 years; the previous seven PMs had a combined tenure of 40. And how about Charles III’s prodigious rate of appointments? His mother reigned for 70 years and saw the tenure of 15 British PMs.

Charles has been on the throne for less than four years and is about to see his fourth.

Perhaps the UK is approaching some sort of Prime Ministerial Singularity, where appointments become so many and short-lived that eventually literally everyone will have held the job. Or perhaps they should rename the job: given how quickly every holder seems to become unpopular, surely the Past-Their-Prime Minister would be a more appropriate title.

There could be other stats, like the innumerable policy U-turns engineered by Starmer – a man who knew he was destined for power two years before the 2024 election, so long as he stood still and didn’t screw up. Stasis, it seems, is contagious: the same do-no-harm stance does not work........

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