BRITAIN is turning over Prime Ministers — six in ten years — at almost the precipitous rate at which Manchester United changes its managers: eight since the departure of the long-serving Sir Alex Ferguson. Occupants of 10 Downing Street come and go at a pace unprecedented in nearly two centuries. Why this demand for instant results?

In the case of football, money is the root of the evil. Failure to qualify for Europe can cost a top Premiership team more than £100 million in lost revenue. Small wonder that clubs’ executives move quickly against struggling managers. Backbench MPs are just as intolerant. A failing Prime Minister means that they may all lose their jobs at the next election. The meteoric rise of Reform UK has concentrated minds in both the old big parties. Politics, like football, has become much less forgiving.

But that is not the only reason. Every Prime Minister since 2016 has registered a higher unpopularity score than their predecessor, Ipsos polls reveal. David Cameron had a negative popularity rating of −38. Teresa May −44. Boris Johnson −46. Liz Truss −51. Surprisingly, Rishi Sunak, who might have expected an uptick after the disastrous 49-day Truss regime, was −56. Sir Keir Starmer had a low of −66. The unpopularity of politicians is, oddly, cumulative.

On the doorstep, Labour canvassers have been shocked to encounter not just disappointment in Sir Keir but a “visceral loathing” of the man. The frenetic fractiousness of social media, assisted by overexcited journalists, is one explanation. But I suspect something more structural.

This week was the tenth anniversary of Brexit. Polling by YouGov suggests that 57 per cent of Britons think that the UK was wrong to vote to leave the EU, and 55 per cent want to rejoin. That still leaves a large number of Leave voters. In Makerfield, 65 per cent of the electorate voted Leave, which is why Andy Burnham trod so cautiously.

Brexit redrew the political map, depriving Labour of its northern working-class base and freeing affluent southern voters of their tribal loyalty to the Conservatives. It also intensified the willingness of MPs to rebel against the party line. Since 2016, prime ministers have been undermined less by the Opposition and more by their own backbenchers plotting in their WhatsApp “research” groups.

Yet, the problem goes back further. Before the 2007-08 global financial crisis, there was a consensus with centre-left and centre-right parties pursuing policies of economic growth. Every generation was better off than its parents.

But then taxpayers’ money was spent rescuing banks — while ordinary folk lost jobs, savings, and homes. Public confidence in political, financial, and economic leaders was shattered. Centrist politicians have lost ground to extremists such as Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and Zack Polanski on the Left, and Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and other European ethno-nationalists on the Right. Politics became less about competing economic programmes — and more about competing identities and worldviews.

To all that, we must add the economic pressures of an ageing population, of climate change, the inflation engendered by Covid, war in Ukraine and Iran — and a politics more focused on winning elections than on governing well. Constantly changing Prime Ministers will not solve any of that without a vision and a long-term plan. That is the challenge facing Mr Burnham.