THE FUSE

The timing was almost too neat to believe. On Monday morning, Sir Keir Starmer stepped outside 10 Downing Street and resigned as leader of the Labour Party, becoming the shortest-serving of Labour’s seven UK prime ministers. The date, 22 June, fell almost precisely 10 years after Britons voted to leave the European Union. The coincidence is not merely symbolic; the causal chain, connecting those two events, is a story of a country enduring a downward spiral of self-destruction. The UK has been many things over the last decade; one thing it has not been is united.