UK UNGOVERNABLE? The Legislative Cure to Political Stability
By Dennis Appiah Larbi-Ampofo Esq. • Lawyer & Governance Consultant
On the morning of 22 June 2026, Keir Starmer stood before the cameras and announced his resignation as Prime Minister. His departure was not the result of a general election. It was not a constitutional crisis in the formal sense. It was the result of something far more familiar to British politics — the slow, surgical art of the internal undercut. With Starmer gone, the United Kingdom will soon welcome its seventh Prime Minister in ten years. The last time Britain went through seven Prime Ministers, it took forty-two years. Gordon Brown, James Callaghan, and Harold Wilson were all considered short-stinted — and each served at least
three years. Today, three years in Downing Street would feel like a generational tenure.
This is not a crisis about personalities. It never was. It is a crisis of governance architecture — and it demands a legislative response, not a better politician.
THE BREXIT WOUND THAT NEVER CLOSED
Let us start where it all began — June 2016. The Brexit referendum did not merely change Britain’s relationship with Europe; it fundamentally destabilised the country’s political centre of gravity. What followed was a decade-long unravelling: Theresa May, consumed by the impossible geometry of Brexit negotiations. Boris Johnson, who got Brexit done and was then undone by his own conduct. Liz Truss — forty-nine days in office, brought down by a mini-budget that sent the pound into freefall. Rishi Sunak, rejected in the biggest Conservative electoral defeat in two centuries. And now Starmer, pushed out not by voters but by his own party’s fear of the next election.
A June 2026 poll marking ten years since the referendum found that 61% of Britons now consider Brexit a failure. 57% say leaving was the wrong decision. Two-thirds across all party lines say it damaged the economy and drove up the cost of living, 75% now prefer closer ties with the EU. And yet Nigel Farage — the architect of Brexit – is more popular than ever.
“The British public have concluded that Brexit was a mistake. And yet
many of the same voters are turning to Nigel Farage — the man who made
Brexit happen.” – Dennis Appiah Larbi-Ampofo Esq.
When the original product fails, the salesman does not lose credibility. He simply finds a new product to sell. Today that product is grand-standing nationalism wrapped in the language of common sense. And it sells.
THE POLITICS OF THE UNDERCUT
If there is one defining feature of British governance in this era, it is what I call the “politics of undercutting — the engineered removal of leaders not because they have failed the country, but because they have become inconvenient to their party” . By May 2026, over ninety-five Labour MPs had called for Starmer’s resignation. One cabinet minister and four junior ministers had already walked out. The Labour Party was reacting viscerally to local election losses and the spectre of Farage in 2029.
Andy Burnham is now the overwhelming favourite to become the next Prime Minister. He is charismatic, credible, and carries genuine working-class authority. But I will say plainly what many in Westminster are quietly thinking: given the political climate in Britain today, I would not be surprised if Labour replaces him too before 2029. Not because he will fail — but because the machinery of undercutting does not stop for talent.
“The UK’s problem is not a PM problem. A new Prime Minister is a
symptomatic response to a structural disease.” – Dennis Appiah Larbi-Ampofo Esq.
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MADISON SAW THIS COMING
In 1787, before political parties in the modern sense even existed, James Madison sat down and wrote what would become one of the most prescient political documents in the history of democratic governance. In Federalist No. 10, Madison described the danger of factions — organised groups united by a common passion or interest, set against the broader good of the community. He defined a faction as:
“a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the
whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of
interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 10, 1787
Madison understood that liberty itself was the oxygen that kept faction alive: “liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” he wrote. You could not kill factions by suppressing liberty — that would be the cure worse than the disease. The answer, Madison concluded, was to build a Republic with structural safeguards: separation of powers, a federal system, staggered terms, and constitutional checks — mechanisms designed to slow down the velocity of factional politics and protect the machinery of governance from its own worst impulses.
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In the nearly two hundred and fifty years since Madison wrote those words, American presidents have faced some seismic collapses in popularity — from Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, to George W. Bush over Iraq, to the political convulsions of more recent years. Had the United States operated under a British variety of modern times — where a party revolt can remove a sitting leader overnight — it is reasonable to suggest the country would have burned through fifteen to twenty presidents in the last thirty years alone. The American system, for all its dysfunction, holds. It holds because the framers built in friction.
Today Trump has one of the worst favorability anywhere in the developed world for the of State, but the line is still holding.
THE EUROPEAN MIRROR
France is extraordinarily difficult to govern. When Macron raised the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four in 2023, 1.28 million people took to the streets in a single day. Eight major unions coordinated strikes. Paris was paralysed. Macron invoked Article 49.3 — bypassing parliament entirely — and drew accusations of democratic overreach. And yet he remained in office. The Fifth Republic’s executive framework gave France durability of leadership that was entirely independent of Macron’s momentary popularity. France’s politics can be volcanic. Its governance remains continuous.
Italy tells the other story. Since 1945, Italy has had sixty-nine governments — one every thirteen months. The 1946 constitution deliberately weakened the Prime Minister’s office in reaction to Mussolini, and what it produced instead was permanent instability. Shifting coalitions formed and collapsed on backroom deals. Corruption flourished in the vacuum. It took the Mani Pulite judicial investigations of the 1990s to force a reckoning. Italy is the cautionary tale. Britain is beginning to look like the sequel.
THE POPULISM ECONOMY
What connects Brexit Britain, Macron’s France, and Farage’s rising Reform Party is not merely political turbulence. It is a structural shift in what voters demand and what political actors are willing to sell. Across Europe and the wider West, there is a burning desire for solutions — miraculous ones, at that — solutions with no opportunity cost, no sacrifice, and no waiting. Nationalism and populism have become the most marketable products on the political shelf precisely because they promise everything at no charge.
So instead of tough, enduring policies that genuinely address debt crises, unemployment, inflation, migration, and income inequality — the kind that require years to bed in and demand patience from an electorate — political actors sell quick fixes. They promise to resolve in two years what has taken two decades to build up, and they promise to do it without asking anything of the people. These promises are made not because they are true but because they are easy to sell. And the fastest route to power, in this environment, is always the same: make the incumbent look inadequate.
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This dynamic is especially corrosive in coalition-based parliamentary systems, where a leader’s mandate is perpetually contingent on internal popularity. In such systems, the calculus is brutal: any sufficiently unpopular decision — even a necessary one — becomes ammunition for rivals within the same party. Leaders therefore face a terrible choice: govern well and face internal revolt, or govern safely and achieve nothing. Most choose the latter. Some choose neither. Most often the country drifts.
LEGISLATION AS THE COUNTERWEIGHT
This is where legislation enters — not as a panacea, but as the most reliable mechanism we have developed, across centuries of democratic experience, for correcting the volatility of the human governance system.
I speak from experience here. As President of the National Union of Ghana Students, I worked directly with Ghana’s Parliament on legislative engagement processes that shaped Education governance reform. Later, working with the Philadelphia City Council, I witnessed at first hand how well-crafted legislative frameworks can act as ballast against the storms of political fashion. I am a lawyer by training. I know that legislation is not perfect. But it is the closest thing we have to a rational, durable counterweight to the thirsty urges of political actors.
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The German model is the most instructive example in the democratic world. After the
Weimar Republic’s catastrophic instability — which saw over twenty governments fall in fourteen years and ultimately opened the door to Hitler — the framers of Germany’s 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz) designed a system with deliberate friction built in. At the heart of it is Article 67: the constructive vote of no confidence. Under this provision, the Bundestag cannot remove a sitting Chancellor unless it simultaneously elects a replacement with an absolute majority. You cannot simply bring down a government in protest. You can only remove a leader if you already have a viable and democratically endorsed alternative. In seventy-five years of the Federal Republic, this mechanism has been formally invoked only twice — in 1972, when it failed, and in 1982, when it succeeded in replacing Helmut Schmidt with Helmut Kohl. Two invocations in over seven decades. That is what legislative architecture looks like when it is built to last.
Spain adopted a similar constructive vote mechanism in its 1978 Constitution, drawing explicitly on the German model after its own experience of authoritarian fragility under Franco. Sweden operates a system of negative parliamentarism, in which a Prime Minister can govern with a minority provided no absolute majority actively votes against them — a structural presumption in favour of governing continuity rather than political paralysis. These are not coincidences. They are deliberate legislative choices made by framers who understood that political actors, left to their own instincts, will always prioritise faction over country.
The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property”. — James Madison, 1787. Two hundred years later, I dare say it is inequality, migration, and the cost of living that feed the same beast.” ~ Dennis Appiah Larbi-Ampofo Esq.
WHAT BRITAIN NEEDS TO BUILD
What Britain needs now is a more ambitious legislative framework, one that addresses not just election timing but the internal mechanisms of party governance and the conditions under which a sitting Prime Minister can be removed mid-term.
Such a framework might include: a statutory minimum threshold for any internal party confidence process that triggers removal of a sitting Prime Minister — requiring, for instance, a formal parliamentary resolution rather than a simple party membership ballot; a requirement that any leadership challenge within a governing party be accompanied by a clear alternative programme of government, put to a parliamentary vote; and strengthened protections for civil service continuity during leadership transitions, so that the machinery of the state does not grind to a halt each time a party decides it needs a new face.
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None of this is anti-democratic. Quite the opposite. Democracy is not simply the ability to remove leaders — it is the ability to govern. A democracy that changes its leaders at the speed of a social media news cycle, driven by internal party polls and electoral anxiety rather than constitutional process, is not a stronger democracy. It is a weaker one.
THE PRESCRIPTION
Seven Prime Ministers in ten years. It took Britain forty-two years to do that before. The question is not whether the UK can afford a legislative counterweight to political instability.
The question is whether it can afford not to have one. At some point, the politics of the undercut will undercut the country itself. No new Prime Minister — not even Andy Burnham — will govern their way out of a structural failure on charisma alone.
As a lawyer, I do not believe legislation fixes everything. It can be gamed and it can be repealed. But it is the antidote — imperfect, yes, but the best one we have — to political actors who, left unchecked, will always choose their own survival over the country’s stability. Britain has one of the oldest parliamentary traditions in the world. It has the capacity to build this framework. What it has lacked, in the decade since Brexit, is the political will — because the very actors who benefit most from the current architecture of instability are the ones who would need to change it.
Madison knew it in 1787. Germany learned it in 1949. Italy relearned it the hard way. The UK must learn it now — before the lesson becomes far more painful than a change of Prime Minister.
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Dennis Appiah Larbi-Ampofo is a Lawyer and Governance Expert. He served as President of the National Union of Ghana Students and has worked with key governance institutions like Ghana’s Parliament, UNESCO , UN Transforming Education, Ghana’s Ministry of Education and the Philadelphia City Council on various projects across legislative and governance reforms.
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