“We have these big structural, economic problems that people really face in their everyday lives,” says Bick, pointing to wages stagnating in real terms, an ongoing productivity crisis, challenges in funding public services, and low public and private investment.
Politicians’ hands are largely tied when fixing these problems. Economically, high levels of debt and the influence of the bond markets make it difficult to borrow the country’s way out – while external factors like supply chains, energy prices, and conflicts in Iran and Ukraine add to the mix. Politically, prime ministers serve many masters – MPs in their own party, the markets, and voters alike.
David Moon, head of the University of Bath’s politics division, believes the political churn has deeper – and more intractable – roots: “The rapid turnover of prime ministers reflects a deeper structural crisis: the neoliberal settlement that underpinned political legitimacy from the 1980s collapsed after 2008, leaving a political class with no compelling positive offer beyond the management of decline – stagnant wages, crumbling public services and increasingly insecure living standards.”
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By contrast, Bick believes the mayfly-like job security of Premier League managers is driven by the extreme financial consequences of success and failure. Relegation from the Premier League comes with an estimated financial hit of £100 million, while qualification for the Champions League nets clubs at least £15.7m, rising to around £100m for the winners. Faced with those incentives, sticking with the wrong manager can be expensive.
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The voters and the fans
Just like football fans, voters can be quick to sour when their team isn’t winning. Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, argues: “British voters, especially since Brexit, have become more volatile and less loyal, which means that people who’ve voted for the governing party are more likely to switch to an opposition party if they don’t get what they want.”
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As he resigned, Starmer accepted he had “heard the answer of my parliamentary party” as to who was best to lead them into the next election. In football terms, he realised he’d lost the dressing room.
Bale adds: “MPs, who like football club owners are ultimately results-led, and especially MPs belonging to the governing party, are well aware of this and are therefore much more likely to panic and ditch their leader if he or she becomes unpopular.”
But our political leaders can feed this instability, says James Wood, an associate teaching professor in the University of Cambridge’s politics department.
“I think part of it is that voters can’t accept the hard truths about Britain’s economic, political and social challenges, and successive prime ministers have not been honest about the bounds of what’s possible in the current situation,” says Wood.
‘It’s much easier to replace the manager’
In some aspects, the roles of prime minister and football manager have become more similar in recent years, says Bick.
Neither are given very long to prove themselves, and both jobs have grown increasingly “presidential”. Just as managers are expected to be the face of their club across constant media engagements – with surliness or poor answers here almost as damning as poor results on the pitch – prime ministers have become figureheads like never before. In turn, both become lightning rods for any discontent.
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“It’s much easier to replace the manager than it is to replace all the players, and it’s much easier to replace the prime minister than it is to replace an entire party or reimagine how you do politics from the ground up,” Bick says.
Can it be fixed?
Fixing our instability is no easy task. We are swept up in global problems which seem to be moving in one direction, says Moon.
“Across the countries once described as ‘the west’, politics increasingly seems to have narrowed around the same themes: greater rearmament, stronger borders and a message that ordinary people must tighten their belts. The difficulty is that climate change will intensify many of the pressures behind these policies – through crop failures, resource conflicts and displacement on a scale that will drive further global migration,” Moon says.
The coming man faces a big test. For Moon, Burnham’s leadership is “an important test of whether so-called sensible, centrist politics can still deliver on its core promise: that steady reform and competent government can actually make people’s lives better.”
But, says Wood, there are signs that the latest manager might be falling into the same short-term traps.
“It’s a bit rich of Burnham to ask for longer than Starmer to fix the country’s problems, when he wouldn’t do the same thing to Starmer who was always clear that he viewed turning Britain around as a two-term, decade-long project,” Wood says.
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“It seems more about sub-party factions infighting, rather than trying to do what’s right for the country, in part, because voters don’t want to face the consequences of the hard choices that need to be made. So, in essence, I can’t see an end to it any time soon.”
Read more by Greg Barradale
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