The stability they promise: Britain changed prime ministers without a vote

On 17 July Andy Burnham was declared leader of Britain’s Labour Party and therefore prime minister. He was the only eligible candidate: 379 MPs nominated him — over 94% of the parliamentary party, against a required minimum of 81. There was no vote, because there was nobody to compete against.

This is Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. The country has not changed heads of government at that rate in nearly two centuries.

The story deserves attention not because it is Britain, but because it tests an argument constantly made in our part of the world: that stability matters more than pluralism, because elections produce chaos.

How it happened

Keir Starmer resigned on 22 June, less than two years after a landslide victory. The reason is simple and measurable: at the May local elections Labour lost 1,496 council seats while the right-wing Reform UK gained 1,453 and took control of 14 councils.

The governing party saw the result, took fright, and changed its leader — not through a ballot of its own members but by agreement inside the parliamentary party. Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner, who could have stood, endorsed Burnham instead.

There is a further detail that sharpens the picture: Burnham was mayor of Greater Manchester for a decade and, according to reports, holds no seat in parliament. A prime minister outside the House of Commons is, in British constitutional practice, an extraordinary position.

What actually happened here

Formally, nothing was broken. A party is entitled to choose its leader by its own rules, and the leader of the majority party becomes prime minister — that is what a parliamentary system is.

In substance, something else occurred: the country acquired a head of government for whom nobody voted — not the electorate, not even the party membership. And it happened in response to a rise of right-wing populism, which is to say precisely when legitimacy is needed most.

I do not regard this as the end of British democracy. But it should be called by its name: institutions that cannot cope with pressure begin economising on procedure. At first this looks like sensible speed. Later it turns out the procedure was the substance.

The second story: Ukraine

Almost simultaneously, an event of the opposite form and the same meaning took place.

On 16 July Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, after six months in post, widely credited as one of the architects of Ukraine’s drone programme. More than a thousand people came out onto Kyiv’s central square with Ukrainian and European flags, chanting “shame” and demanding Fedorov’s return. The protests spread to other cities and continued until 19 July.

This was in a country that three days later absorbed the largest ballistic attack of the war: 41 missiles and 125 drones.

The government responded not with suppression but with softening: Zelenskyy said he was confident Fedorov would remain on his team.

The comparison this piece was written for

Two countries in one week.

In one, living in peace and security, the governing party dispensed with a ballot and installed a prime minister by agreement.

In the other, under daily missile fire, people came to the square to argue with their own government about a personnel decision — and the government backed down.

This demolishes both convenient schemes at once. The claim that a mature democracy is automatically protected against the erosion of procedure does not hold. Nor does the claim that during a war politics must fall silent because there are more important things.

Ukraine right now is the most inconvenient counter-argument available to anyone who explains the absence of political life by external threat. There, the threat is not hypothetical; it arrives at night. And the square still works.

Why this concerns us

Kazakhstan holds elections to the Kurultai on 23 August — a new unicameral parliament of 145 deputies elected from party lists. The new Constitution, adopted by referendum on 15 March, came into force on 1 July. The Senate has been abolished and the office of vice-president introduced.

I will not attempt to assess that construction — it is new, and judging it from the text is premature. But the British story offers useful optics for any system.

Legitimacy is not the outcome of a vote. It is a person’s sense that their participation matters. It arises not from turnout percentages or ballot counts but from the presence of a real choice, and from the fact that the decision could have gone otherwise.

When there is one candidate, the procedure becomes a formality regardless of how correctly it is conducted. And that works identically in a parliamentary monarchy and in a presidential republic.

My view

The “stability in exchange for pluralism” argument rests on the assumption that these are different things, and that one can be taken while the other is given up.

Britain shows the opposite. Seven prime ministers in ten years is not a consequence of too much democracy but of a political system that stopped processing public discontent and began accumulating it. Reform UK did not appear from nowhere: it gathered up those who found no representation in the existing parties. Changing a leader without a ballot does not solve that problem; it defers it.

Stability bought by giving up procedure is not stability but a postponement. The difference reveals itself at the moment the postponement ends, and it usually reveals itself badly.

The Ukrainian square under missile fire says the same thing from the other direction: a society permitted to argue with its government turns out to be more durable, not weaker. That is not a pretty thought but an observation. A state that gave ground to a thousand people on a square went on fighting the war. That is what a working political system looks like — it bends because it does not want to break.