On Monday, July 20, Andy Burnham walked into 10 Downing Street as the United Kingdom's new prime minister. He is the seventh person to hold that job in a little over ten years. Let that number sit for a moment. Seven prime ministers in a decade. His first promise to the country was that Britain would, in his words, "regain our stability." It tells you something that the headline achievement a new leader can offer is simply to make the chaos stop.
We are watching this from across the Atlantic, and we should be watching closely — because the story of British politics over the last ten years is not really a story about Britain. It is a story about what happens to a democracy when the sensible center collapses, when governing becomes a cycle of reaction and revenge, and when no one is left to do the slow, unglamorous work of actually solving problems. It is, in other words, a preview.
Seven Prime Ministers, Ten Years
Run the list. David Cameron resigned in 2016 after losing the Brexit referendum he himself called. Theresa May spent three years trying to deliver Brexit and was devoured by her own party. Boris Johnson won a commanding majority and then collapsed under a pile of scandals. Liz Truss lasted forty-nine days — the shortest tenure in British history — after a budget that spooked the markets so badly the Bank of England had to step in. Rishi Sunak steadied the ship for twenty months before losing power entirely. Keir Starmer swept to a landslide in 2024, one of the largest victories in modern British history, and was gone in under two years. Now Burnham.
Some of those exits were scandal. Some were policy disaster. Some were simple electoral defeat. But taken together they describe a system that has lost the ability to hold a course. Governments arrive, promise transformation, run into reality, and are discarded. The average British prime minister over this stretch has lasted well under two years. You cannot govern a country in eighteen-month increments. You cannot plan a budget, a defense posture, an energy strategy, or a health system when the people in charge change faster than the seasons.
The Swing Gets Wider Every Time
Here is the part that should get our attention: the instability is not settling down. It is accelerating.
Consider Starmer. In 2024 he won the kind of mandate most politicians only dream of. Less than eighteen months later he was finished — his poll numbers in freefall, his own MPs maneuvering against him. What broke him was not only his own missteps. It was the rise of Reform UK, Nigel Farage's populist party, which barely existed a few years ago and now holds more local councillors than any other party in England after the May elections. Labour bled voters to the Greens on the left. The Conservatives bled voters to Reform on the right. The two-party system that governed Britain for a century is splintering in real time.
This is the pattern we have written about before — the pendulum that swings harder each time it is pushed. Each governing party overreaches or underdelivers, the public recoils, and the reaction is larger and angrier than the last. The center does not hold because there is less and less of a center left to hold it. Voters are not drifting toward a stable middle. They are scattering to the edges, looking for someone — anyone — who seems to offer a way out.
Why This Should Sound Familiar
If any of this feels recognizable, it should. We are on the same road, a few years behind.
Look at our own recent history. Power in Washington now flips with nearly every election. Narrow majorities ram through sweeping legislation on party-line votes, and the other side campaigns on undoing it the moment they return. Executive orders stand in for laws, and each president spends his first months reversing the last one's. We govern by reaction. We have our own populist surges, our own collapse of trust in institutions, our own voters who feel that neither party speaks for them. The 80% in the middle — the people who are not ideologues, who simply want a country that works — watch both parties chase their bases and wonder who is representing them.
The difference between Washington and Westminster right now is mostly one of degree, not kind. Britain's parliamentary system lets it change leaders overnight, so its instability is fast and visible. Ours is slower, hidden behind fixed terms — but the underlying disease is the same. A hollowed-out center. A politics of grievance. An inability to tackle the big, slow problems because everyone is too busy fighting the last election and bracing for the next one.
Instability Itself Is the Cost
It is tempting to treat all this as spectacle — a soap opera of resignations and reshuffles. It is not. The instability is itself the damage.
When Liz Truss lasted forty-nine days, it was not merely embarrassing. Her budget nearly broke the British bond market, and ordinary people paid for it in higher mortgage rates. That is what political chaos does: it shows up in your interest payments, your pension, your grocery bill. The countries that pull ahead over the long run are the ones that can commit to a direction and stick with it long enough to see results. The ones that thrash — lurching left, then right, then left again — pay a compounding price. Nothing real gets fixed, because fixing anything real takes longer than any of these governments survive.
We have our own version of a problem no one stays in office long enough to solve: a national debt now past $38 trillion, climbing by tens of thousands of dollars every second. It goes unaddressed because addressing it requires a sustained, bipartisan commitment across many years — exactly the thing our politics has lost the ability to produce. Every problem that takes longer than one election cycle to solve is, in effect, orphaned.
This Is Not Inevitable
Here is the good news, and it is real: none of this is fate. Britain did not end up here because the British are uniquely incapable. It ended up here through specific choices, specific incentives, and specific failures to correct course while correction was still easy. We still have time to make different choices. But time is the operative word — the longer we wait, the wider the swings get, and the harder they are to stop.
What does correction actually look like? Not a single savior and not a single election, but a set of intentional steps, most of them unglamorous:
Rebuild the center. A durable politics needs a home for the majority of Americans who are not at the extremes. That is the entire reason we exist — to represent the middle that both parties have abandoned. Stability comes from a large, sane center, not from whichever faction wins the latest fight.
Fix the machinery that rewards extremism. Reforms like ranked choice voting, open primaries, and independent redistricting change the incentives that currently reward the angriest voices and punish compromise. You cannot ask politicians to behave better while the system pays them to behave worse.
Restore the habit of cooperation. The refusal to work across the aisle is not toughness; it is dysfunction. A country that treats every opponent as an enemy cannot sustain any policy long enough for it to succeed. Civility and cooperation are not niceties — they are the load-bearing walls of a stable republic.
Govern for the long term. The debt, entitlements, infrastructure, the basic solvency of the country — these demand commitments that outlast any one administration. That means prizing competence and continuity over spectacle, and rewarding the leaders who solve slow problems, not only the ones who win fast news cycles.
These are not radical ideas. They are common sense. They are also, not by coincidence, the core of what we are building. The British are now hoping that a seventh prime minister in ten years can finally deliver the stability the last six could not. We would rather not put ourselves in the position of hoping for the same thing.
Andy Burnham may well succeed, and we wish him and the British people well — a stable, prosperous ally is good for everyone. But the lesson for America does not depend on how his premiership turns out. The lesson is in the number itself. Seven prime ministers in ten years is what the end of the road looks like. We are still early enough on that road to choose a different one — if we start now, and if we mean it.