Less than two years after he won a huge majority in the 2024 general election, Sir Keir Starmer has been forced out.

Few politicians have endured a more dramatic fall from grace than Sir Keir Starmer. Less than two years ago, he was celebrating a landslide general election victory and was seemingly set to dominate British politics for years to come. Now he has been ejected from power by his own party and instead of ushering in a "decade of national renewal," as he had promised, he is contemplating a return to the back benches. In an emotional resignation speech, delivered at a lectern outside his Downing Street front door, he said his party had asked "whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election". "I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace." The scale of Labour's victory in 2024 puts Sir Keir in very rarefied company - only two previous Labour leaders, Tony Blair and Clement Attlee, had managed to win elections with three-figure parliamentary majorities. But it was achieved on an historically low share of the national vote, and Sir Keir's popularity with the electorate nosedived within weeks of him arriving in Downing Street, after a series of mis-steps and policy U-turns, and never really recovered. The fact that he will go down now in history as Labour's shortest-serving prime minister will be a bitter pill for him to swallow.