Keir Starmer Resiging as UK Prime Minister Trump Bashes him on way out Rising

Every decision I've taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. That is the breaking news this morning. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he is stepping down from his position, making him the sixth Prime Minister in 10 years to resign. Starmer's Labour Party swept to power in a landslide election less than two years ago, but since then his popularity has taken a nosedive. He says he will stay on as Prime Minister until his successor is chosen, which could be within days. But it wasn't Starmer who initially broke the news yesterday. Trump, Donald Trump, our president, posted on True Social, Keir Starmer will resign as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He failed badly on two very important subjects, immigration and energy, open North Sea oil. I wish him well. We love the backhanded compliments of Donald Trump. Maybe you can explain to me, Niall, why this happens with such frequency, or at least as of late, the British Prime Minister's resigning. It's so foreign to us in America because in America our leaders never resign, never step down, never go away, even when they're caught doing things or they mess things up way, way worse than your British equivalents. Our people cling to power and there's no independent mechanism to force them from power, but it's very Chinese. He died of shame when he failed to, you know, please the Shogun or something. All over the place, is what I mean. Look, there's no question that it's harder and rarer here, I mean, Nixon being the sole exception, I think, right? But I mean, it's partly to do with the vagaries of a parliamentary system, right? In other words, if your party thinks you are destined to lose at the election, then they just depose you in a way that isn't quite analogous to a presidential election where it's the individual running and the individual getting elected. That being said, I mean, when I was a younger person than I am now, we had Margaret Thatcher for, I think, 13 years and then there was John Major briefly and then Tony Blair, the Labour Prime Minister for a very long time. They've gotten shorter and shorter. They have. I blame social media, Rob. It's making people impatient. Well, so does Keir Starmer. Actually, to speak of him, I don't feel very positively about him or his governance. You know, not my country, I don't pay so close details to everything, but he seemed to me to have gone all in on the social media, the age ban, monitoring. He's trying to grapple with the phenomenon of social media in ways that I think are illiberal and not advisable, and I don't know if that has anything to do with the state he's found himself in because some of these policies do have bipartisan or cross-ideological buy-in, but I'm very against them. I know you are. I think you would be in a minority in Britain where they are fairly popular. I think really two things happen. Well, three things with Starmer. Firstly, he's just not a particularly charismatic person. He's not a natural leader, and that does matter, I think, especially in this current digital communications age. The second thing is he didn't take care of his own base without getting too deep into the minutiae of this. Just right after Labour came to power with this thumping majority, they took away winter fuel allowances from what we would say old-age pensioners, you would say seniors, I guess, and the idea that you were going to punish old folks as a Labour government, well, what does the British Labour Party exist for then if it's going to do that kind of thing? As much as it warms Robbie's heart. Well, you see, you're just out of step with the British mainstream. You won't be being replaced as Prime Minister, I don't think, at this stage. And then the other thing is the ghost of Mr Epstein remains with us because, of course, there was the whole storm about Peter Mandelson, who had been the British ambassador to the United States, appointed by Starmer. It turned out that that appointment had been made despite the fact that Mandelson had failed a security vetting and his relationship with Epstein, his friendship with Epstein, had been known about. Starmer said the extent of it was not known. Mandelson denies all wrongdoing, but that controversy hammered Starmer at a time when he was already vulnerable. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. And you're such, you're sceptic about Epstein, so you're literally on the opposite side to the British public on every one issue. Yeah. Well, so this does not mean the Conservative Party suddenly comes into ascendance because it is not an election, it's just his own party replacing their leader. That's right. And the new Prime Minister is almost certainly going to be a guy called Andy Burnham, who I think would be regarded maybe as a notch or two to the left of Starmer. There's questions about Burnham's exact ideological consistency. He had to get elected. He was mayor of Manchester, England's second largest city. You can't be leader of the Labour Party unless you're a member of Parliament. Burnham won what Americans would call a special election, a by-election recently, and now it seems like he's going to be crowned as leader of the Labour Party, which will then make him Prime Minister. And there has to be, your elections aren't regularly scheduled, so there has to be some kind of call for an election to see if we're done with our little experiment in Labour governance. That is true. To be clear, you can't just go indefinitely. There's a fixed term. They tried to do away with this briefly and it didn't really work. The government of the day gets to choose whenever within a certain period they can hold an election, which is a fascinating exercise in political tactics. It used to be, and I think still is the case, that when the Conservative Party are in power, they almost never call a general election in July or August because their more affluent base has fled the country for warmer climate. Things like that take place. But Labour has a little while to go. I guess one parallel that may be of interest to an American audience is the Conservative Party, so long the dominant centre-right party, is now in real peril from Nigel Farage, a kind of basically Trumpist figure, and reform, which is doing very well in the polls. The Conservative Party is doing terribly in the polls, so all of these dynamics. Very interesting. Well, we will pay close attention to that. We will. Coming up in my notes, President Trump is right, I think, to try to end the war in Iran, but Israel is getting in the way of a deal. Don't go anywhere, we'll be back in a second.