This month Britain got its seventh prime minister in a decade, with Andy Burnham replacing Keir Starmer, who resigned after two years of policy reversals and a collapse in public support that even his own parliamentarians could not ignore.

It is a useful moment to revisit a book written 85 years ago by a different Burnham entirely: James Burnham, whose 1941 work TheManagerial Revolution predictedalmost exactly the kind of ruling class now failing across the West and in South Africa.

It is also a useful moment to look at the three leaders currently proving Burnham's prediction is not inevitable.

What Burnham Argued

James Burnham, a former Trotskyist, made a claim that startled both the political left and right of his day. Capitalism was ending, he argued, but socialism was not what would replace it. What was arising instead was a new kind of planned, centralised society that would be neither capitalist nor democratic in any accepted sense. The people who would run this new order were not owners of capital but controllers of it: business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and military generals, whom Burnham grouped together as "managers".

The mechanism Burnham identified was the separation of ownership from control. Because modern economies had grown too large and complex for individual capitalists to run directly, state-style administrative control would prove more efficient than rule by individual owners, resulting in the decline of capitalist democracy and the rise of managerial control backed by an unlimited state.

His companion volume, The Machiavellians (1943), went further, arguing that every ruling class dresses its pursuit of power in the language of universal good. Formal democratic procedure survives; substantive control quietly relocates to the people who hold administrative and technical power, regardless of who wins an election, what today would be called the “deep state”.

What Burnham did not fully anticipate is the more interesting story now unfolding: that managerial rule would prove not durably efficient but chronically incompetent, and that a small number of leaders would break the pattern entirely by refusing to manage and choosing instead to govern.

Starmer: The Technocrat with No Answer

Keir Starmer was the purest recent expression of managerialism as a governing style. A human rights lawyer and former director of public prosecutions, he offered himself to Britain as the antidote to chaos: no ideology, only management. Commentary in the weeks around his resignation described his approach in almost Burnhamite terms, with his governing style being more reactive than proactive, designed less to represent the public than to manage it, with anger buried under bureaucratic process.

Even sympathetic assessments concluded that Starmer tried to rebuild state capacity through technical modernisation and digital tools, while avoiding the harder work of actual reform.

The result was two years in office followed by resignation, Starmer’s party, Labour, being routed in local elections, and succession by a rival, Andy Burnham, who took office promising to be a "circuit breaker" for a country exhausted by a decade of revolving leadership.

The managerial model did not fail because Starmer was uniquely inept. It failed because managerialism, as James Burnham foresaw, substitutes administration for leadership.

Ramaphosa: Management as a Substitute for Governing

Cyril Ramaphosa's presidency runs the same experiment in South Africa. Ramaphosa built his political identity on the promise of a "capable state", a phrase lifted straight from managerial vocabulary: fewer ministers, lifestyle audits, an end to state capture, a leaner executive. Eight years after he became president, none of that has happened.

His 2018 pledge to cut Cabinet size gave way instead to a Government of National Unity (GNU) Cabinet of 32 ministers and 43 deputy ministers, costing taxpayers millions of extra rand in salaries, staff, and perks, with his own State of the Nation Address (SONA) this year making no mention of reducing it.

Meanwhile unemployment, the measure against which any government should be judged, rose to 32.7% in the first quarter of the year.

The GNU itself is the clearest Burnhamite artefact in South African politics: a structure built to manage disagreement between the GNU partners rather than to set the country on a bold new economic trajectory. The GNU sets itself the task of managing a permanent crisis.

The Circuit Breakers

Burnham's model has one visible flaw: it assumes managerial entrenchment is close to permanent once achieved. Three leaders, two modern and one from the recent past, show it is not, and the method each used was the same.

Javier Milei took office in Argentina in December 2023 with a currency in freefall and inflation approaching 300%. He did not manage the crisis; he dismantled the machinery that produced it, closing government ministries, sacking tens of thousands of state employees, and floating the currency. Inflation, which had approached 300% at the start of 2024, is expected to fall to around 30% during 2026, the country's lowest annual rate in almost a decade, while Argentina recorded its first fiscal surplus in more than 14 years. None of that came from consensus-building. It came from a single figure willing to own the outcome.

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, took a similarly unmanaged approach to a problem South Africa knows well: high levels of violent crime, mostly because of criminal gangs in the country. In March 2022 he declared a state of emergency, which suspended normal legal process and led to mass arrests, a policy every human rights body has criticised and most Salvadorans have credited with saving their country. The national homicide rate fell to 1.3 per 100 000 people by 2025, down from a peak of more than 100 per 100 000 in 2015, and El Salvador now records among the lowest murder rates in the Western Hemisphere after having been the most violent country in the region for some time.

Bukele did not administer the gangs into decline through interagency coordination. He took direct, personally attributable responsibility for a shock policy and stood behind its results.

Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, offers the founding template both men are, whether they know it or not, replicating.

He took Singapore from a poor, ethnically divided port city expelled from Malaysia in 1965 to one of the wealthiest economies on earth within a single generation, through a state that was highly interventionist but never diffuse: decisions were made and owned by an identifiable leadership, not laundered through process.

Lee's Singapore was managerial in Burnham's technical sense, a state run by planners and technocrats, but not managerial in the pathological sense Starmer and Ramaphosa now embody, because authority and accountability never separated. When something failed, it was Lee's failure.

That is precisely the linkage Burnham warned would dissolve under managerial rule, and precisely what Milei and Bukele have each, in their own way, forced back into place.

The Pattern Burnham Missed

Burnham thought managerial rule would be more efficient than the systems it replaced, whatever its democratic costs. What has actually happened in Britain and South Africa is that the managerial class has captured the institutions of the state without acquiring the competence to run them. Starmer and Ramaphosa represent leadership defined by process, credentialism, and administrative caution rather than by outcomes.

Milei, Bukele, and Lee show the alternative is not the absence of a strong state but the presence of one where a person, not a process, answers for what it does. Burnham was right that the managers would take power from both capital and the ballot box. He did not foresee that a leader willing to reattach his own name to the consequences of his decisions could still break the machine.