Newspaper Reader opines : (Sir Keir Starmer—Britain’s beleaguered prime minister—has played a good hand terribly.) and other pressing questions…
May 17, 2026
Is Britain ungovernable?
Recorded on May 14th · 47 min
Episode summary
Sir Keir Starmer—Britain’s beleaguered prime minister—has played a good hand terribly. When Labour ousted the Tories in the last general election it won a thumping majority and a mandate to revive a stagnating country. Two years on, Sir Keir’s poll numbers have collapsed, his party has been hammered in local elections and his MPs and ministers are turning on him. The prime ministership that was supposed to show Europe how to save centrism now looks unsaveable.
What went so wrong? Is Sir Keir uniquely incompetent or has Britain itself become ungovernable? Join Edward Carr, our deputy editor, and a panel of our journalists as they make sense of the chaos in Westminster, explain why Britain can’t seem to keep a prime minister and ask whether centrist politics has a future—in Britain or anywhere else.
https://www.economist.com/insider/the-insider/is-britain-ungovernable
Editor: Without the stern guiding hand of Zanny Mention Beddoes, and the utter absence, as always, of a viable transcript, with which the reader might check the arguments of the participents, the listener then is at the whim of political chatters, and the vagaries of memory !
Newspaper Reader.
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