从大胜到出局，只用了两年：英国首相斯塔默，为什么倒下了？

Today, we'll talk about a major political event unfolding right now.

UK Prime Minister Starmer,

just this week,

formally announced:

he is going to resign.

Britain's prime minister,

you can simply think of as

the country's

highest leader in charge.

This event,

the reason it surprised so many,

is that the contrast

is simply too great.

Let's first turn the clock

back two years.

The Starmer of that time

could be called gloriously triumphant.

In the 2024 general election,

he led his party

to win

an overwhelming victory.

In parliament,

they seized in one go

an astonishing number of seats.

It was, in decades,

one of the most beautiful victories.

At that time,

almost everyone felt:

this new prime minister

could last a very, very long time.

He himself once said

he wanted, in this post,

to serve a full ten years.

But

no one expected

that after only two years,

everything

would completely change.

So,

where did it all go wrong?

The most fundamental thing

is still ordinary people's wallets.

These two years,

prices in Britain

just wouldn't come down.

Ordinary people buying things,

paying water and electricity bills,

all found it harder and harder.

Life was tight and pinched,

and in everyone's hearts,

there was naturally anger.

And precisely at this time,

the government, for its part,

produced a string of

scandals and embarrassing reversals.

Many policies once promised

were later walked back.

Ordinary people felt:

your word —

does it count or not?

This discontent

quickly

showed up in the ballots.

In this year's local elections,

Starmer's party

lost catastrophically,

shedding a huge number of seats.

This was tantamount to

voters handing him, to his face,

a big fat 'fail'.

Even more deadly,

even his own people

began to stop backing him.

Starting this spring,

the officials working with him,

like dominoes,

resigned one after another.

There was the minister for health,

and the minister for defence.

Just this month,

because they couldn't agree on military spending,

the defence ministry, all at once,

lost several people.

Each of these resignations,

every time,

was a public declaration to the world:

we,

in this prime minister,

have lost confidence.

And the last straw that broke him

may be the rise of another man.

This man

is called Andy Burnham.

He is the mayor of a big British city,

and is hugely popular.

Interestingly,

at Starmer's hardest moment,

someone deliberately

cleared, for Burnham,

a seat in parliament.

This week,

Burnham smoothly won the election,

returning to parliament.

This move

is seen by many as

a key step in his bid

for the prime minister's chair.

Public pressure ahead,

a strong rival giving chase behind,

Starmer

finally could hold on no longer.

And so,

he announced his resignation,

and,

to choose the next leader,

set out a timetable.

Speaking of this,

I want to say one more thing to you.

The great win two years ago,

and today's exit,

belong to the same man.

In between,

the biggest change

was not, in fact, him,

but the people's hearts.

Power, this thing,

arrives with great fanfare,

and when it leaves,

it can be utterly merciless.

Finally,

I want to leave you two questions.

First,

do you think

a leader's true skill

is the moment of winning the election,

or

is it whether, in the hardest days,

he can still

keep people believing in him?

Second,

when a person

realizes that he has already

lost everyone's trust,

to leave with dignity —

does that count as

a kind of courage too?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they're worth our

thinking about slowly.