Mind the revolving door

Keir Starmer is on his way out of Downing Street. His likeliest successor, Andy Burnham, would be the seventh person to run the country in ten years. Westminster tends to treat this kind of churn as theatre. The people deciding where to put their money treat it as information.

It is worth going back to what JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in May, when Starmer's grip first started to slip. JPMorgan had only recently committed to a vast new headquarters in Canary Wharf: three million square feet, space for twelve thousand staff, the better part of £10 billion flowing into the London economy and some 7,800 jobs riding on the build. Asked whether the threat to Starmer changed any of that, Dimon drew a careful line. It was not instability in itself that gave him pause, but the danger that whoever came next might turn hostile to the banks. His firm had already paid roughly $10 billion in additional British taxes and had no appetite to be milked further.

That line is the whole point, and it does not let the revolving door off the hook. A change of leader rattles investors precisely because each new tenant is another spin of the policy wheel. Gilts sold off as Starmer wobbled and firmed up when he looked likely to survive. Money is not sentimental. It reads instability as risk and charges for it.

A government that turns over every other year cannot credibly promise much to anyone. Credibility is what investment actually runs on, and Britain keeps burning through it.

Viggo Terling