Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom (UK), has resigned.

He made the announcement yesterday morning outside 10 Downing Street, the British prime minister’s official residence.

Starmer said that a new leader of the Labour Party will be in place by September. Given Labour’s large majority in Parliament it is likely the next Labour Party leader will also be the next prime minister.

This comes after Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, won a by-election last week to become a Member of Parliament (MP). This opens the way for Burnham to run for the position of leader of the Labour Party, and potentially prime minister (in order to be eligible for the leadership of the Labour Party a person must first be an MP). Burnham has been seen for some time as a potential challenger to Starmer and is the leading candidate to succeed him. After Starmer's resignation yesterday Burnham confirmed that he would be running for the position of Labour leader.

It now remains to be seen whether there will be any challenges to Burnham. One potential challenger, Wes Streeting, a former Cabinet minister, said he would back Burnham for the Labour leadership. There has also been speculation that former deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, could stand against Burnham, but she has not made an announcement yet that she plans to do so. If no candidates come forward Burnham will become Labour leader unopposed.

Whoever succeeds Starmer will become the seventh British prime minister in ten years.

Starmer was quoted as saying: “When I leave the biggest job in the country, I shall spend more time on the most important job, being the best husband I can to my fantastic wife Vic, who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad, and being the best dad I can to my beautiful children, who are my pride and my joy.”

Burnham is on the left of the Labour Party and some of his comments in the past have raised concerns about his views on economics.

While Labour has a large majority in Parliament, Burnham (or whoever wins the Labour leadership election) will be under pressure to call an early election and secure their own mandate. However, current polling shows that Labour would likely lose an election, with it polling at about 20%, with Nigel Farage's right-wing populist Reform UK leading polls, at about 27%.

However, given the UK’s first-past-the-post system, the proportion of the vote a party wins rarely matches its proportion of seats, making predictions of who could win the next British elections difficult.

If Farage does become prime minister he will be the first person from neither the Labour nor the Conservative parties to become prime minister in more than a hundred years.

The current situation in British politics, with the crumbling of old certainties and the emergence of new players, such as Reform UK and the Green Party is a growing phenomenon in democracies around the world, and South Africa is no exception. The African National Congress (ANC), which dominated South African politics for so long, is not the force it was, and in the upcoming local government elections, due to be held in November, the ANC will likely find itself on more municipal opposition benches than ever before.

And while the ANC is still the single-biggest party in South Africa, there is now a real possibility that after the next national election, the president of the country will not be from that party.