Who will fix not-so-Great Britain?

In the end, it was sunshine and showers in Britain, the morning after it acted on the advice of one of its leading tabloids and changed its “manager”. Despite Euro 2024, the reference was not to football and Rishi Sunak, the Conservative Party’s last PM in its latest 14-year spell in govt, smoothly moved off the field. In concert, Keir Starmer, who is only the seventh Labour leader to become Britain’s PM in the party’s 125 years, swiftly assumed charge of Team GB.As rain poured down, Britain was back in play, but it’s not yet clear if it will be outlier or late-starter in a Western political landscape that’s increasingly marked by the embrace of populist right-wing Christian nationalism.With this election, Britain has given its support — as well as a stonking majority — to a centre-left moderate technocratic govt. This comes at a time that countries across Europe and potentially US as well, are moving away from the political centre-ground and towards hard-right ethno-nationalism. But the British govt’s new chief executive is a former human rights lawyer. And by some accounts, this is the first time in 23 years that three of Britain’s constituent countries — England, Scotland and Wales — have the same largest party, which suggests a more united nation than in years. In the prosaic, tortured language so characteristic of Starmer then, this is a moment to “relight the fire” and to feel the benediction offered by the “sunlight of hope”.But is it really?The election has shown that Britain’s political climate is immensely volatile and could swing any which way. In 2019, Sunak’s former boss Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in a giddy moment that suggested the Conservatives would hold power well into the 2030s on a fairly insular programme that pulled up the drawbridge against Europe. But now, it’s Starmer who is said to have won the chance for Labour to govern for at least a decade.That said, Starmer’s Labour takes charge of Britain with just 34% of the national vote, the lowest-ever winning share and only 10 points higher than the Conservatives, who haemorrhaged support to the anti-immigrant Reform Party. Reform, which is led by Donald Trump’s favourite Brit, arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage, could well be the embryonic English equivalent of France’s far-right National Rally. The latter is currently surging to power in national elections. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump congratulated Farage for his “big WIN” in the parliamentary constituency he contested on July 4. But Reform’s real victory could be deeper and more lasting.Even so, despite the strong gusts of political heavy weather from across the English Channel and the Atlantic (as well as its actual weather), Britain’s post-election choreography worked perfectly and the symbolism proved pitch perfect. Sunak noted the long arc of history that yoked his destiny via his Indian immigrant grandparents to modern Britain. He said that “one of the most remarkable things” about Britain is “how unremarkable” it was he became PM within just two generations of his grandparents arriving in the country. It was quite remarkable too he added that no one thought it extraordinary for his little daughters to light Diwali lamps on the steps of Downing Street.It was a gracious, if pointed reference to Sunak’s dizzying rise in frontline British politics, the first ethnic Indian and practising Hindu to become PM and the first to have an Indian-born-and-bred wife.It says something that the Sunak family was propelled to national public attention less than a decade after the former investment banker was fielded in a safe Conservative Party constituency in Yorkshire. And it’s quite remarkable that most of the debate about Sunak has revolved around the quality of his political charisma rather than the colour of his skin. For instance, there were few snide remarks when he met Heeramandi star Manisha Koirala at Downing Street during the election campaign to mark 100 years of the UK-Nepal friendship treaty. However, in an indication of the difficulty of navigating this particular course, Sunak has made clear he will stand down as party leader as soon as possible, even as analysts predict a more decisive exit from British politics as a whole.Interestingly, many see Sunak as almost a younger version of Starmer, who will take on his job as chief “manager” and coach of a small island with a historically big backstory but an increasingly dolorous record on productivity, investment opportunities and political stability. Both men came to the job of politics as an afterthought. Both are sometimes described as monochrome. Both are technocrats who prescribe sober-minded guardianship of the treasury, something that’s boring but essential in a country with impossibly stretched public finances and with govt debt soaring to its highest level since the 1960s.Like Sunak, there is little to suggest that Starmer has much interest in the traditional British preoccupation with re-establishing Britain’s “place in the world” because the country’s concerns are so overwhelmingly domestic in this moment, its favourite pastime is navel-gazing.But insularity is an illusion in a globalised world where climate change, supply chains and viruses respect no passports and brook no borders.