Sir Keir Starmer is likely to become the UK’s longest-serving Prime Minister since David Cameron after the Labour Party won the 2024 General Election on July 4 and could even eclipse Tony Blair’s 10-year reign.
That’s according to Online Betting Guide OLBG who believe that Sir Keir is also more likely to match Margaret Thatcher for time spent in No. 10, than fall out of power as quickly as Liz Truss, who famously failed to outlast a lettuce during her 44 days in power in 2022.
However, the Labour leader will have to have his wits about him despite leading his party to the supermajority that was predicted pre-election. Gone are the days of the Palace of Westminster being viewed around the world as a bastion of stability.
Thanks to the crisis-hit reigns of the four most recent leaders to hold the office of Prime Minister, the average term length has collapsed to a measly one year and 364 days, or at least that’s what it will drop to if Sunak is pushed out on July 5.
Not so long ago, the all-time average spell for a Prime Minister was three years and 303 days, stretching from Robert Walpole to Cameron. The post war period pushed that average even higher to five years and 26 days before Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Truss and Sunak came along.
Labour and Starmer will have a busy intray when they take power, and there’s no guarantee that a change in management will settle the turbulence of UK politics. Critics of both the Tories and Labour claim neither party is even talking about the hard decisions that need to be made to fix what’s broken across the country.
The odds suggest that the most likely scenario is that Starmer will survive through to the next UK General Election that should take place as scheduled in 2029 and even win a second term as PM with a term as short as Truss an outside bet at 100/1.
He will need to stay in power for 10 years and then some to match Blair, the last Labour leader to win a general election, lasting 10 years and 57 days between 1997 & 2007, with OLBG pricing that possibility at 12/1. Thatcher, the longest-serving PM of modern times, held on for 11 years and 209 days. Starmer would have to reach February 2036 to match “Maggie” – not the longest odds at 16/1.
Yet, with odds of 20/1 that he won’t last beyond 2024, even if he does manage to beat the short-lived reign of Truss, Starmer will not be able to take anything for granted in the wild, wild Westminster of the 2020s.
