Andy Burnham became Britain’s prime minister on Monday, taking office after Keir Starmer travelled to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to King Charles III. Burnham made the same journey shortly afterwards and was invited by the king to form a government. He is the seventh person to hold the office in the ten years since Britain voted to leave the European Union.
“It requires my generation of politicians to raise our game,” Burnham said outside Number 10 in his first remarks as prime minister, acknowledging that many voters “have grown frustrated with politics.” He added: “I want to be honest with you: We have not been good enough, and we need to be better. We will be.”
Starmer had delivered his own final speech outside Downing Street earlier in the day. “My work is done,” he said, adding that in six and a half years he had taken Labour “from a historic defeat in 2019, changed it so it was fit to face the country, and won a landslide general election victory in 2024.” He called serving as prime minister “the privilege of my life” and closed: “I go with good grace, I go with a smile, and I go proud of everything we have achieved.” He had been prime minister for two years.
The speed of Burnham’s ascent has no modern parallel. He was not a member of parliament five weeks ago. Burnham spent close to a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester and stood down to contest the Makerfield by-election on June 18, a seat vacated specifically to give him a route back to Westminster; he won it with about 55 percent of the vote and a majority of more than 9,200 over Reform UK. Thirty-two days separated his arrival in the Commons from his arrival in Downing Street.
The office has been changing hands at a rate that has become its own political fact. Britain has had seven prime ministers since the June 2016 referendum — David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, Starmer and now Burnham — six handovers in a little over ten years, or about one every twenty months. Across the seven decades before the referendum, the country changed prime minister roughly once every five years.
Five of those seven took office without winning a general election. May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Burnham all became prime minister because a governing party replaced its leader mid-term; only Cameron and Starmer arrived by winning a national vote. That is entirely regular under British constitutional practice, where the government is drawn from the Commons rather than elected directly. It does leave Burnham to choose the timing of his own test: the next general election is not due until 2029.
One immediate casualty of the handover falls on Wednesday. On June 16, on the margins of the G7 in France, Starmer and European Council President António Costa fixed July 22 as the date for the second post-Brexit UK-EU summit, to be held in Brussels. “My Labour government is delivering on our promise to reset our relationship and put Britain at the heart of Europe,” Starmer said at the time, and Costa said both sides were “working closely together to make our upcoming second summit in Brussels on 22 July a success.”
That summit is not taking place. The EU shelved the date once Starmer announced he was going, with the European Commission saying it was reassessing “the opportunity of still holding the summit” and a Cabinet Office message confirming July 22 was off. Costa has since said he wants a summit with London before the end of the year, which would push the second meeting of the post-Brexit reset almost a full year past its first anniversary.
Burnham inherits the conditions that ended his predecessor rather than a clean slate. Starmer’s personal ratings collapsed over two years in which voters concluded he had not delivered visible change on living costs or growth, and he was criticised for appointing Peter Mandelson — a friend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — as ambassador to Washington, before dismissing him. The May local elections, in which Labour lost 1,496 council seats and Reform UK gained 1,453, made the leadership question unavoidable.
Burnham arrives as the most prominent English mayor of the devolution era, having built a national profile largely outside Westminster during the years his party spent first in opposition and then in government under someone else. He now has to convert that into a governing programme, and to decide how long he can wait before asking the country to ratify a job his party gave him.