Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigns

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1:25Select this offer from 6.15 to 7.26. Online only. Size availability varies by crust type. Max 7 toppings. 6 for pan and New York style crust. Minimum purchase required for delivery. Prices participation delivery area and charges may vary. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Janet Jalil and at 15 Hours GMT on Monday the 22nd of June, these are our main stories. The British Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigns just two years after his landslide election victory. Europe suffers another record heat wave with temperatures forecast to go well over 40 degrees Celsius. The number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo passes 1 ,000.

2:13Also in this podcast? Because it is very difficult for not to be seen by two people. the referee and the linesman. So that's why I said it was the hand of God. 40 years since football legend Diego Maradona's controversial World Cup goal, we speak to someone who was at that match.

2:37For the fourth time in four years, a British Prime Minister has announced their resignation while standing at a lectern in front of No. 10 Downing Street. Nearly two years after his landslide election victory, Keir Starmer, having repeatedly said he would not stand down, announced that he would be going after all, following a series of scandals and blunders that have seen his popularity plummet. He said he accepted that he had lost the trust of the governing Labour Party. Every decision I've taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party.

3:17I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision. I will ask the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to set out a timetable with nominations opening on the 9th of July and completed by the summer recess. In the case of a contest, this will ensure a new leader is in place before Parliament returns in September. I will remain in post as Prime Minister until the contest is complete. And 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, Fig, who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad.

4:04And being the best dad I can to my beautiful children, who are my pride and my joy. Thank you very much.

4:15Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, announcing his resignation. Well, the favourite to succeed him, Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, who's just been re-elected as a member of Parliament, confirmed that he would be running for the top job. And he's been given a boost by another major contender, the former health minister, Wes Streeting, who said he would be backing Mr Burnham to become prime minister. This means that Britain could have its seventh prime minister in a decade as soon as next month. I asked our political correspondent, Rob Watson, why Mr Starmer felt compelled to go now.

4:51Well, he felt compelled to go and he certainly didn't want to go. That's for sure. He thought that he was doing a good job, that actually what comes next won't necessarily be any better. But essentially, he had lost the support of the governing Labour Party. and if you don't have the numbers in Parliament, you can't really carry on governing. And essentially, he lost that support because he'd become so fantastically unpopular with the voters. And therefore, Labour MPs thought that he was a threat to the very existence of their party. Yes, we think like the unforced error of appointing Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to the US.

5:26There has been a mixed reaction, however, to Mr Starmer going, with some supporters feeling he should have been given more time to fulfil his mandate. Let's get a flavour of the public reaction. I think it's just shameful that he was hounded out, really. And I think that the British public is too swayed by the fact that he wasn't a born leader. I'm just so upset. I've been crying in bed because I'm just so upset about it all. Yeah, brilliant news. Fabulous. My family, friends, everyone's been speaking to people in the village. We're all really happy that he's gone. We will look back on this in years to come as a real mistake.

6:01we need a general election. This currently needs a general election. And picking up on that last point, Rob, that is a problem for Mr. Starmer's successor. They won't have the authority of having been elected the way that Mr. Starmer was. True. I'll get to that in a second, Jeanette, but it's fascinating hearing those voices. They just tell you how much of emotion, anger and turmoil there is out there amongst the voters. But to get to your question, it's true that constitutionally there doesn't need to be an election. That's not the way our system works. The next election isn't due until 2029.

6:33But of course, it complicates things that Andy Burnham, we presume it'll be Andy Burnham becoming prime minister, hasn't himself won a general election. So if you like, instead of hitting the ground running, he's going to be hitting the ground with an uphill battle, as you kind of heard at the end with one of those voices there. And it's looking increasingly likely that it will be Mr. Burnham because one of his main rivals where Streeting, another former minister, has now backed him. Yeah, so it does look like we're heading more towards a coronation. That would certainly be Mr Burnham's preference.

7:05And there are those in his camp who argue, look, it's bad enough, Jeanette, having to inflict a seventh prime minister on the British people in 10 years. Surely we don't want them to give them a sort of angry internal debate within the Labour Party, as well as a seventh prime minister. So that is the argument for a coronation. I mean, And of course, the argument against that is, well, if you're going to have seven prime ministers, maybe you should test him out or her out before inflicting them on the British public. But that's the way it looks like it's heading. Especially because a lot of people say there isn't that much difference between Mr.

7:36Burnham and Mr. Starmer. And he will have the same huge challenges that the outgoing prime minister faced. Yes, I mean, absolutely. To deal with that, you have to ask yourself, if Britain has had seven prime ministers in 10 years, maybe it faces some pretty huge problems and we know what they are it's stagnating economy concern that nothing works properly in britain anymore public services stretched and this sort of deep concern about social cohesion and immigration and absolutely i mean there's bound to be vast amounts of skepticism that maybe it's true that andy burnham is a sort of more likable relatable character than keir starmer much better communicator much better messenger but those challenges haven't worked and they've done for six people already Rob Watson.

8:21Well, we heard the views of some voters. Let's also get the reaction from opposition parties to the British Prime Minister's announcement that he's standing down. The leader of the main opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Baden-Ock, questioned why Mr Starmer wasn't being immediately replaced. We need to ask why he set out this timetable. What are we waiting for? There are critical decisions that need to be made, and the Prime Minister is setting out his farewell tool while Andy Burnham wants a summer holiday. It's really, really important that we ensure that the country is being governed. Keir Starmer has had to resign because his defence secretary said he was not looking after national security.

8:59Whatever happens now, we need to make sure that national security is the number one agenda. And that means that Andy Burnham needs to explain where the money to fund our defence is coming from. And he needs to cut welfare to pay for defence. After a succession of conservative and now Labour prime ministers, leader of the next biggest opposition party, Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats, also expressed his concerns. I think people are pretty fed up with the merry-go-round of prime ministers. Nothing seems to change. So just changing the person at the top won't deliver the change that people need.

9:31We need to change our broken political system. And if we do that, yes, we can rebuild our relationship with Europe and grow our economy and deal with the cost of living. Yes, we can reform social care so we can get our NHS better. And we can have electoral reform and put power back to communities. So let's reserve our judgment on Mr Burnham. Whereas the leader of the right-wing populist party, Nigel Farage, called for a general election rather than the governing Labour Party simply replacing one leader with another. And we have more on this on our YouTube channel. Search for BBC News on YouTube and you'll find Global News Podcast in the podcast section.

10:09There's a news story available every weekday. Much of Western Europe is sweltering under yet another fierce heat wave with record-breaking temperatures forecast. Sports events in Spain and Germany have been cancelled or postponed. Temperatures are also soaring in Portugal, Italy and the UK with weather warnings issued. Hena Hundle is a five-time delegate to the UN climate change conferences. Extreme heat is a global problem, but it's also uniquely a European problem. According to the European Environment Agency, Europe is actually the fastest warming continent on the planet. The World Meteorological Organization has told us that over the past 30 years, Europe has seen temperatures rise at a rate more than twice the global average.

10:53And we know that last year in 2025, more than 95 % of Europe was hit by above average annual temperatures. In France, alcohol has been banned at festivals with temperatures expected to go above 40 degrees Celsius in many places, including Paris, where our correspondent Huescofield is. This is not going to get any better before the middle end of the week. And in the meantime, it's 40, 41, 42. Paris could easily hit 40 tomorrow or Wednesday in parts of central France, Poitiers, Limoges, west central France. It's already above 40 degrees. It's intolerable. It's insufferable. It's extremely difficult to live through.

11:38But it is becoming something people have to get used to. It's a second heat wave in a month, and we're only just arriving in summer. And France, like the UK, is not really set up for this kind of weather. We don't have air conditioning units, say, for instance, in the same way that southern European countries do. So how are people coping? Indeed, and it is beginning to enter the debate, this whole issue of the sort of lack of preparation, as the government's critics would put it. Now, that's true. Air conditioning is not something which is uniformly there in schools or in hospitals. And there's a big debate now about whether that should be the case, whether it should be the mass roulette of air conditioning, knowing that there are certain people on the environmentalist movement who are opposed to air conditioning because of the damage it does to the environment.

12:26but you know that the real life consequences of this heat are becoming more and more apparent and the fact is that even myself I'm affected because my children can't go to school today that applies across the country schools being shut or parents being told listen please don't bring your children to school today because we were faced with temperatures which are just simply intolerable for them and that's what's happened to where I am now and it's happened right across the country. And back in 2003, there was a heat wave in which many hundreds of older people in particular died, because it was right in the middle of summer when their families had gone away, they were on their own.

13:04Is the big fear that this could happen again? And what has been done to prevent that? That was the famous 2003 heat wave in that yes, 15 ,000 people died. It was back then something for which the country was totally unprepared. We can see now that it was as a kind of precursor of all that's followed. Nowadays, because of the recurrence of similar episodes, maybe not quite as extended as that, but they have become repeated, people are more aware. And there is far more kind of mutual help. Places are made available, cool zones. Museums, for example, I'm reading today, have been open in Lyon so people can cool down there.

13:43There's far more air conditioning on public transport. I was traveling around at the end of last week when it was extremely hot, expecting to be suffering on public transport. In fact, his trains were among the coolest places there were to be. So there have been an awful lot of improvements and that massive death toll from back then has not been repeated. Hugh Schofield in Paris. And since we spoke to Hugh, reports have come in of two children aged two and four being found dead in their family car in the south of France. The authorities say while the precise cause of death has not been determined, They think it's probably linked to the heat wave.

14:20As we record this podcast, the full circumstances are not yet clear. Still to come in this podcast, we look back at the career of Alan Greenspan, the longtime US Federal Reserve Chief who presided over a period of prosperity, but was later criticized for failing to prevent the 2008 financial crisis. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.

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16:42This is the Global News Podcast. Now to a grim milestone in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The number of Ebola cases in the DRC has risen to more than 1 ,000. Figures released by the authorities also say that of those, 250 people have died. The current outbreak was first declared by Congolese officials in mid-May, but it's feared that the virus may have been circulating undetected for weeks or even months before then. I got this update from our reporter in Kinshasa, Emery Makumeno. Since May 15th, when this budibungo strain of Ebola was declared, we've seen the number of infections increase, the number of deaths increase, including the number of health zones.

17:32These are the health districts here. They initially started with three. Now we have reached at least 31 health zones infected by this Ebola outbreak. These numbers are likely to increase when they would include the additional numbers on Sunday and today, unfortunately. So we are standing at 1 ,003. A laboratory tasted positive and then among them you have 254 dead already. But Emery, there is some positive news in the fact that the numbers of those surviving this Ebola outbreak, this strain of the virus, is higher than in previous outbreaks. That number has reached 100 people that have been discharged from the Ebola treatment centres.

18:22And what health authorities have been telling us here is that when people report early to the treatment centers, there is a high chance of being cured by this Ebola. What we've seen in the one month or so is that because of the skepticism and the people were not going to the Ebola treatment centers early, they were rather going to traditional medicine or traditional doctors for treating what they believe was poison or mysterious illness, if some even have gone to see pastors. But with the crisis communication that has been happening, they are reporting that more and more people are coming to treatment centres early for being taken care of.

19:12There was that case, wasn't there, of a six-year-old girl with Ebola who was taken from a hospital in the north of the country. Do we know what happened there? Well, the six-year-old was found in the Musienene Ebola Treatment Center because finally authorities, after search, they could locate her and their mother. We were told as of Wednesday that when they found her, after being adopted from an Ebola treatment center in about 25 kilometers in a different territory, They were found and the girl was believed to be in stable conditions and she was receiving treatment at the Musi Nene Ebola Treatment Centre.

19:57Emery Maccobeno. One of the United States' most influential economists, Alan Greenspan, who served as the head of the US Federal Reserve under four presidents, has died at the age of 100. Mr Greenspan led the US Central Bank for nearly two decades, serving under Presidents Reagan, Clinton and both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He was widely credited with presiding over a period of growth and prosperity in the US. But the 2008 financial crisis prompted a reassessment of his legacy and he was accused of stripping away the safeguards that would have prevented it. Andrew Walker looks back at Mr Greenspan's career.

20:42The Henry Jerome Orchestra in the 1940s. Among the saxophone players was a young Alan Greenspan. But within a year of that recording, he was at New York University studying economics. That ultimately was the career he chose, and it led him to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, perhaps the most powerful economic official in the world. While he was in office, many thought he was doing a great job. A book about him had the one-word title, Maestro, Mr Greenspan ran the Fed throughout the longest period the US has had without a recession, the boom of the 1990s. At one stage, he wondered aloud whether the financial markets were getting ahead of themselves.

21:21How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? and how do we factor that assessment into monetary policy? In practice, he didn't do much about it. After that comment in 1996, the US had the technology boom and bust and then, in the following decade, the housing and credit boom and the financial crisis that followed. Some blamed him, at least in part, for keeping interest rates too low and being too resistant to financial regulation. He was confronted with this criticism by a congressional committee investigating the crisis, chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman.

22:10Over and over again, ideology trumped governance. Our regulators became enablers rather than enforcers. Their trust in the wisdom of the markets was infinite. The mantra became, government regulation is wrong, the market is infallible. Mr Greenspan acknowledged that he had got some things wrong. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.

23:01That statement was reasonably comprehensible. but he also had a reputation for speaking in impenetrable language. There was even a name for it, Greenspeak. Often people wondered what on earth he'd really said. Usually it was the financial markets that had to decode his statements, but his wife Andrea Mitchell also seems to have struggled at times. He claims that he proposed to me three times before I understood what he was saying. I think that he's making that up, but it is true that he said he was certainly hinting at marriage long before we ended up deciding to actually get married. So perhaps it is that I didn't understand him.

23:38What is very easy to understand is just how events changed Alan Greenspan's reputation. For a time, he got much of the credit for what seemed to be one of the strongest periods of American economic history, the growth of the 1990s. And then he came to be blamed for one of the worst, the financial crisis. It was a remarkable career path for a man who could easily have chosen a less controversial life as a musician.

24:05And that was Andrew Walker looking back on the life of Alan Greenspan, who has died at the age of 100. Well, Mr Greenspan also acknowledged that the years of low economic growth in the West that followed the financial crisis led to the rise of economic populism, which saw Donald Trump win the US presidency and Britain voting to lead the EU, otherwise known as Brexit. Well, a lot has changed in the decade since, with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and President Trump's threats to seize Greenland, leaving Europe feeling the most vulnerable it's been since the Second World War. Now, nearly 10 years to the day since the Brexit vote, the EU's then chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has been speaking to the BBC about the threats that the bloc faces today, saying it can't risk being too flexible with the UK in new talks aimed at getting rid of post-Brexit trade barriers.

24:59Here's our Europe editor Katja Adler.

25:06During the long, often tortuous years of Brexit negotiations, I often made this journey from Brussels to test the temperature in Paris. It was seen by so many in the UK as the Brexit bad cop. But times have really changed. Now the UK and France hand in hand have led Europe over helping Ukraine. But with the UK government now insisting it wants to get closer to the EU without paying too much or having to accept freedom of movement, is the EU any more flexible 10 years on? You seemed very strict with the UK at the time. You were famous for being very strict and saying Brexit is Brexit. Strict but never aggressive.