UK: Starmer leaves 10 Downing Street for final time as Andy Burnham readies to step in

Keir Starmer has left Number 10 Downing Street for the last time as Andy Burnham is slated to officially become the new prime minister of the United Kingdom on Monday.

At a "special conference" on Friday, Burnham was confirmed as the new leader of the UK Labour Party, taking the reins from Starmer.

After replacing Starmer as leader of the ruling party, Burnham is slated to become the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday.

Burnham becomes Labour leader in last step before taking over as UK PM

British lawmaker Andy Burnham has been confirmed as the new leader of the Labour Party.

Starmer had inherited the leadership of the party six years earlier.

Back then, Labour were polling at 29 percent, 22 points behind Boris Johnson’s Conservative party.

Starmer was described as a “ruthless” politician, aimed at turning the Labour party around. He spent four years in preparation to fight a winning electoral war.

Eventually, aided by the Conservative party's scandals and changes in their leadership, Labour became more popular, and gradually it gained the lead in the July 2024 general elections.

Starmer won the elections by promising the voters that “country first, party second”.

However, it turned out that perhaps “country first, party second” is not the best policy to govern by.

His decisions on domestic issues such as welfare reform, winter fuel payments and farmers’ inheritance taxes, as well as his foreign policy moves in regard to Ukraine and Palestine, were not well received by his other party members as well as the voters. And, the backlash from both of them increased as his popularity with the public decreased.

Labor's poor performance in the 2026 local elections and a series of cabinet resignations sounded the alarm for everyone that it was time for Starmer to go.

Now, Burnham, nicknamed "King of the North", has been given the chance to restore Labour's popularity once more.

The ex-Mayor of Manchester turned UK Prime Minister aims to achieve the “new era of possibility” by saving the struggling UK economy and its strained public services.

Burnham says he plans to bring “Manchesterism” — his brand of business-friendly, locally empowered social democracy — to No. 10, and then distribute his philosophy to the rest of the UK.

In his nine-year stint as Mayor of Manchester, Burnham oversaw the city's economy grow to close to twice the rate of the rest of the country.

One of the locals described the new Manchester as “different ” to what it had been to those who had moved out of the city and now were back and were seeing it after a while.

“It feels like a different city,” said Lucy Ellison, 33, after working abroad for 12 years. In the past, we did not have any far-out "shops and independent bakeries" in Manchester. Ellison described the new Manchester as "unrecognizable" to the locals. Official government statistics show Manchester's GDP rose from £35,864 per capita in 2011 to £65,591 in 2023, representing an 83 percent increase.

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