Politics: no hiding place

By Richard North - June 24, 2026

Bearing in mind that for most of the days through June, we’ve had the central heating on for at least part of the day, and there has scarcely been a single day without rain, the shrieks from the media about the impending Armageddon, just because the sun is shining, are a little hard to take seriously.

Therefore, I rather enjoyed the corrective piece in the Telegraph written by Ysenda Maxtone Graham with the headline: “Heatwave hysterics wouldn’t have lasted a day in 1976”.

The sub-head tells us that fifty years ago, children cycled across dried-up river beds and sweltered in classrooms without water bottles or parental panic as indeed was the case – I remember it well.

Despite that, the BBC is as close to hysteria as it is possible to be without lying on its back, screaming and kicking its heels, talking of red extreme heat warnings and high humidity levels – the conditions likely to last until Friday.

There is much talk of temperature records being broken but, with the accuracy of Met Office records under suspicion, it is hard to tell whether ant new records will be real, or just artifacts, artificially inflated to support the global boiling hype.

As a perennial topic for light conversation, however, the weather is at least providing some relief from the ever-present soap opera surrounding Starmer’s demise and the ascent of the great pretended, Andy Burnham.

It says something of how far down the list of people’s concerns the issue has dropped that none of the stories listed on the BBC website as “most read” have anything to do with either Starmer or Burnham.

Nevertheless, this apparent lack of interest does not seem to have slowed the saturation coverage in the media, demonstrating perhaps that the Fourth Estate is about as out-of-touch with public sentiment as the politicians about whom they report, albeit that most of the stories take second place to the soaring temperatures.

One article of interest, though, comes with the Financial Times which asks (rhetorically, of course), “Why does Britain keep changing prime ministers?”, noting that Starmer’s successor will become the seventh leader in roughly a decade since the Brexit vote.

It used to be that continental countries changed their leaders faster than many of their citizens changed their underpants – Italy comes to mind – but now even this traditionally volatile country takes second place to the UK, alongside Japan (which is a little surprising).

And not only is just the turnover which is remarkable. The FT notes that three of the recent leaders – David Cameron, the “Oaf” Johnson and now Starmer – have announced their resignation within three years of winning an unexpectedly large parliamentary majority.

A version the same story appears in the Guardian which ventures that most people put the rapid rate of change down to Brexit. But, in a speech to the UK in a Changing Europe conference held yesterday, election guru John Curtice argued that the reasons were more complex (as they most often are).

Curtice agrees that this is true of Cameron and it was a string influence in the case of Theresa May, but it hardly applies to Johnson or Truss and it’s certainly not true of Sunak. Says Curtice: “One had their somewhat loose relationship with the truth. One didn’t listen to their civil servants … and the other lost an election”.

Nonetheless, Curtice does concede that the political turbulence generated by Brexit has been important in creating our much more fragmented political system, bit only in the sense that it has acted as a catalyst for forces already impacting on the political system.

Luke Tryl, director of More in Common UK, rejects the idea that Britain has become ungovernable, arguing that those prime ministers who had been forced to stand down early mostly had themselves to blame.

We’ve had a series of PMs, he says, who’ve made fatal mistakes and being unable to show they’re delivering change – that doesn’t mean rushing, but being able to take public on a journey.

Of the current situation, he thinks that the causes of this churn should give Burnham (or even Badenough and Farage) some hope. The public, he says, will engage with tough choices, but it has to be couched in a vision for the sort of country we’re going to build and delivered in a way that commands confidence.

Actually, I would have thought that this doomed all three of the characters Tryl names – none are actually noted for their clarity of vision, not least Burnham, who seems to be making it up as he goes along.

In fact, it is hard not to experience a distinct sense of unease as this man – from outside the Westminster circle – has taken the system by storm and is now set to take over the government with no mandate, no authority, no democratic credentials and little in the way of an openly declared programme for government.

Not a few people are likening this to a bloodless coup d’etat and it is easy to see the similarities. Unlike the previous changes of the guard (with the possible exception of the May-Johnson switch), we have a situation where the replacement is (Burnham) is nominated while the incumbent (Starmer) is still in-post who than stands down to let the challenger take over.

Chris Smith in the FT suggest that financial instability is a major causal factor, arguing that Britain has never fully recovered from the financial crisis of 2008, its growth having slowed more than that of other rich nations after 2010.

Smith cites Paul Johnson, former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He says: “Each of the last few prime ministers has been unlucky enough to take over a country where people have not been getting better off for nearly 20 years and are pretty fed up”, adding that: “I take an almost too simplistic view that the economics drives the politics”

Successive prime ministers, he assets, “have tried to treat the symptoms [of Britain’s problems] without treating the causes”, spending ever more money rather than enacting the difficult reforms needed to boost growth.

As a result, disposable income has barely risen. Since 2022, inflation has been more stubborn in Britain, worsening a cost-of-living crisis. The country is also facing the economic pressures of an ageing population, debt has tripled and taxes are at a record high.

Another influence is attributed to MPs’ rebelliousness, with the suggestion that, since 2016, most prime ministers have been undermined by their own MPs. That is said to be partly a legacy of the Brexit years, which have intensified a long-term trend towards backbench rebellion.

Personally, I don’t see that. Anyone who has charted the turmoil John Major experienced with his MPs over the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty can hardly argue that backbenchers have suddenly become more rebellious.

That leaves the media and we are invited to recall that Tony Blair, just before he stepped down in 2007, gave a speech about the “increasingly shrill” media environment that he argued was making governing more and more difficult.

The web at that time was less developed and social media had not developed its political teeth. The main instrument of personal communication was the fax machine and the Blackberry revolution had yet to come. But there can now be little dispute that rise of platforms such as X and (to a lesser extent) Facebook have had an effect.

Says More in Common’s Tryl, they have “totally changed the nature of electoral competition” in a more fundamental way. As well as encouraging a more personality-centred politics that fuelled the rise of Johnson and Burnham, social media has resulted in what he calls “the Netflix-isation of politics”.

“In the past it was rare you agreed with more than 70 percent of what a party said, and if you really didn’t like them, you switched. Now what people are being offered is politics tailored exactly to their choice”.

That puts the focus on Burnham who has exploited social media to cultivate an affable and down-to-earth persona. But he who lives be social media dies by the same hand. The genre has a pitiless memory, “keeping the receipts” of all past transactions, broken promises, evasions and lies.

Every PM now is under ruthless 24/7 scrutiny by a relentless commentariat, which owes no loyalty and cannot be bribed – where the narrative has passed out the control of the house-trained parliamentary lobby to the feral hordes which can scent blood at a thousand paces.

In other words, there is no hiding any more. The transparency is similar to that of the drone-infested Ukrainian battlefield where the slightest imperfection or weakness is immediately visible and the punishment immediate and severe.

Basically, I don’t think the politicians – and more so the leaders – have yet fully to understand the web. Still less do they understand that they cannot control it. And if that isn’t the whole answer, it is a large part of it. Burnham may yet be its next victim.