A British prime minister is mired in a political drama that may sound familiar to Americans. As Patrick Cockburn writes at the British i Paper, the nation "is facing its Joe Biden moment." Translation: Keir Starmer is facing a fast-growing rebellion from within his own Labour Party but is rejecting calls to quit. The New York Times similarly sees the parallels: Starmer is daring his challengers to use a "process for challenging a leader," just as Biden, before he stepped down, defiantly told his critics in a TV interview to mount their own campaigns and "challenge me at the convention."
In Britain's case, the trigger was bruising local elections that delivered heavy losses for Labour and exposed deep voter hostility toward Starmer. More than 80 Labour lawmakers have publicly urged him to go, and the count has been steadily growing. Worse, a Cabinet member seen as a potential challenger, Wes Streeting, resigned on Thursday. "He's rapidly becoming Joe Biden because he's basically in a bunker with his wife saying, 'It's all going to be fine,'" Rory Stewart, a former Conservative government minister, said last week on his The Rest Is Politics podcast, notes the Times.
Starmer's allies, meanwhile, have fanned out on TV to defend him, while detractors warn that his determination to hang on could ultimately clear a path for right-wing populist Nigel Farage, just as Democrats feared Biden might hand the White House back to Donald Trump. At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir thinks the Biden comparisons are unfair—to Biden, "whose administration accomplished a great deal in a short time despite its abysmal communications skills. I'm not sure Starmer's closest advisers, or his wife, could tell you what his core principles are or why they've led to so much indecision, muddled or mismanaged policy and low-grade scandal."
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