A decade on, it’s becoming clear that something about Brexit has eaten away at our minds.
When you think about the main legacies of the vote, you might come up with that massive spike in immigration. And the blue passports, of course. The economy took a hit too, though we don’t know exactly how big since the EU withdrawal lined up perfectly with Covid and the Ukraine war.
But there’s another thing that I believe the big split has done to this country, and it’s a lot more insidious.
Brexit has given us all a taste for political chaos. We can’t help ourselves.
And when I say ‘ourselves’, I might be talking about the crowd of political reporters to which I belong. But inevitably, it has seeped out to affect ordinary members of the public, too.
In that context, it’s entirely fitting that we’re marking the tenth anniversary of the vote to leave the European Union with the sixth prime ministerial departure in that same timespan.
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You have to go a long way back in British history to find the last time anything similar happened. Clearly, that vote on June 23 2016 has had some sort of impact on our brains.
Brexit itself was only directly responsible for two of those exits, of course. Cameron wouldn’t deliver it, and May couldn’t deliver it. With Johnson, you can take your pick of the scandals. Truss ‘Liz Trussed’ the economy. And Sunak did it the old-fashioned way, by losing an election.
With the latest Downing Street casualty, things are a little more complex.
It’s difficult to pin the downfall of Sir Keir Starmer on any single thing. The Mandelson controversy was significant, but past PMs have recovered from similar. Early setbacks like the freebies scandal could have applied to many of his predecessors.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has climbed to a comfortable lead at the top of the polls under his watch – but there’s a while to go before the next scheduled general election.
There was plenty of criticism over policy (winter fuel, inheritance tax, national insurance for employers) and Starmer’s personal popularity was historically bad, but you’d have to go back to Thatcher and Blair for PMs who were forced out for those reasons. And they both had 10 years.
It’s hard to shake the sense Starmer’s demise is based largely on vibes, and a gradual piling-up of many smaller things.
To be clear, much of that is fair – many Labour MPs didn’t like the culture of his Downing Street or his approach to running the country, and didn’t trust him to get the government out of its hole. More ministers have resigned under him than any other PM since 1979 at this point in their term.
The lack of trust, lack of faith, and lack of cohesion appears to have fed through to the public at large.
But even so, would the country be quite so willing to overthrow its leader after less than two years in power if we hadn’t become so accustomed to it over the past 10 years?
You could argue, at least, that we’re not as bothered by the prospect of unleashing political pandemonium as we once were. How could it possibly be worse than the turmoil post-Brexit?
I don’t know what the UK would have done with a Prime Minister like Keir Starmer before the EU referendum took place a decade ago tomorrow. Perhaps things would have fallen apart in a similar way – all those mistakes would have chipped away at the authority of anyone else in his position.
However, it’s evidently more dangerous to mess things up in a Parliament that has developed a regicide habit. That may be something for Andy Burnham to keep in mind.
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