The hollow succession

Keir Starmer resigned on Monday morning as Labour leader. He’ll hold No. 10 through the summer and attend NATO in Ankara on 7–8 July as Britain’s outgoing head of government.

The readiness gap

The June 2025 SDR admitted that the armed forces are “not currently optimised” for peer-state warfare. The Defence Investment Plan intended to support it has not been published. Reports in January placed the shortfall at £28 billion. CDS Sir Richard Knighton dismissed the precise figure as speculation but conceded to the Defence Committee that the programme cannot be delivered within the current budget. Defence Secretary John Healey resigned over the inadequacy of the settlement on 11 June. The IISS’s 2026 Military Balance identified the bottleneck as capacity rather than capability: logistics and the ability to sustain a warfighting division. RUSI’s hollow-force assessment and Knighton’s January evidence reached the same conclusion.

Spending stood at 2.33% of GDP in 2024 against NATO’s Hague commitment of 3.5% core/5% total by 2035. The distance is visible to Moscow, Beijing and Washington. This is not a failure Starmer manufactured, but he failed to arrest it. Cameron and Osborne’s austerity programme, which ring-fenced foreign aid and the NHS while cutting defence, criminal justice and armed forces personnel, accelerated the hollowing-out. The UK has spent years projecting the posture of a serious military power while systematically defunding the means to back it up. It mistakes declaration for deterrence, and adversaries can read the difference between political theatre and genuine capability. Eliot’s hollow men leaned together, headpieces filled with straw. Britain’s enemies read its defence posture as exactly that: decorative, structurally empty.

Spending abroad what we won’t spend at home

On 18 June the UK announced a £752 million drone package: 150,000 systems direct to Kyiv, funded via the Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration loan against immobilised Russian assets. The hardware will not be operational in Ukrainian units for weeks; the political signal landed the same day. That afternoon, Russian air defences reported intercepting 194 Ukrainian drones on approach to Moscow; the Moscow Oil Refinery was hit anyway, for the second time in 48 hours. The Tyumen refinery, more than 2,000 km from the border, has since been struck. Who knows how many of those drones were British? They did not need to be.

The package was signed off by Healey’s successor, days into the job, while co-chairing a 50-nation Ukraine Defence Contact Group with strategic planning documents still unpublished. The Prime Minister who countersigned it was days from being broken in Makerfield. Three-quarters of a billion via the ERA loan for another country’s drones, and a £28 billion hole in our own: the legal architecture is contested; the political signal is not. Moscow’s calculation is much simpler: a militarily underfunded Britain is prosecuting a war inside its borders by proxy, with Moscow’s own money.

A system that breaks leaders, an electorate without a home

Six Prime Ministers since 2010, three in 2022 alone, and Truss in and out inside fifty days. The civil service outlasts them all; ministers learn the building, not the other way round.

Starmer triggered a contest but stays at No. 10 into September. Burnham’s substantive positions are unstable; on net zero, he has walked them back within days of stating them. Nominations open on 9 July on Starmer’s schedule, not Burnham’s.

Reform UK averages 27–28%; April’s Electoral Calculus MRP puts Reform on 24% and the Conservatives on 21% — a hung parliament. The right’s fragmentation is personal, not programmatic: Conservatives, Reform and Restore converge on HRA repeal, Equality Act rollback, immigration and the quango state. The Greens sit at 13–15%.

Beneath those numbers sits a fiscal emergency Westminster keeps downplaying. Britain now carries the heaviest tax burden of any peacetime period. Public services degrade visibly while population growth outpaces the state’s capacity to deliver. Unemployment is rising, sharpest among the young, because one administration after another — Labour or Conservative — has piled costs on employers: higher taxes, climbing business rates, surging energy prices, and rule after rule layered on. The grievance has material foundations. The political class has not reckoned with them. Makerfield laid it bare: anger and loss running deep through the constituency, with no party left in possession of either.

The mandate problem and the Burnham economic risk

Whoever succeeds Starmer arrives without an electoral mandate. The 2024 manifesto was Starmer’s, delivered on a third of the vote under first-past-the-post. Burnham did not stand at that election; he was Mayor of Greater Manchester. He arrives in Parliament on a single weekend by-election and is set to inherit No. 10 on no personal national vote at all. A successor can govern; they cannot legitimately impose a fundamentally different programme without going back to the country. That ceiling matters: the apparatus around the most likely successor is preparing one anyway.

Burnham is the presumptive successor. He was sworn in as Makerfield’s MP within hours of Starmer’s resignation announcement; Wes Streeting’s endorsement letter went up on X the same morning; Angela Rayner is reportedly minded to back him rather than stand. Roughly 25,000 voters in a single constituency form the entire democratic basis for the man set to be installed as Prime Minister. A sequence that tight did not assemble itself. The contest is closer to a coronation than a race. At headline level, Burnham signals fiscal orthodoxy and defence continuity. The architecture around him points further left. Miatta Fahnbulleh — Peckham MP, long-standing Ed Miliband ally, former Energy Consumers minister at DESNZ, latterly Communities minister, and the first Cabinet member to resign over Starmer in May — is now said to be coordinating Burnham’s policy platform. Her record runs to wealth taxes, further windfall levies on oil and gas, public ownership of energy and water, equalisation of capital gains and dividend tax with employment income, a minimum income guarantee, and state-backed green investment banks.

The heaviest signal is the rumoured chancellor: Ed Miliband. The Energy Secretary who built GB Energy and drove the windfall regime would be the UK’s first net-zero ideologue as Chancellor. The Treasury machinery would still produce its sustainability warnings; what changes is the political willingness to act on them. The institutional brake stays. The Chancellor stops applying it.

The IFS has flagged “chunky” tax rises as the price of even the 3% defence target; a programme of that character makes 3.5% arithmetically unworkable. Lord Robertson’s warning that “we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget” applied to Starmer; it applies with more force here. Without a mandate, the programme either compresses the private-sector tax base under contested legitimacy or stalls under its own contradictions. Markets will not wait for the contradiction to resolve. A Miliband Treasury signal moves gilts, sterling and borrowing costs in days; the discipline that finally constrains the programme may come from the bond desks before it comes from the Cabinet Room.

The signal abroad

Foreign services are watching: a Prime Minister the system cannot sustain, forces officially unready, and three-quarters of a billion via the ERA loan for foreign drones in the fortnight Healey quit over the regular budget. Allies will not object openly. The risk is that they quietly redistribute responsibilities, recalibrate UK reliability, and discount British continuity in long-term planning. That is not a mere diplomatic event; it is a slow erosion of the trust underpinning British influence for decades. Ankara on 7–8 July is Starmer’s last summit as Prime Minister. Allies will see him for what he is: a man already in freefall who has not yet reached for the cord. They will receive him courteously and discount everything he commits to. The conversations that matter are about who is next in the jump seat. Burnham is the favourite to take it.