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On the morning of Monday 22 June 2026, Keir Starmer stood outside Downing Street and announced he would be resigning as Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party. He is the sixth PM to resign outside that door in seven years. Andy Burnham, freshly minted as the MP for Makerfield, is expected to walk in unopposed.
While Starmer spoke, someone across the road was blasting Ode to Joy from a big speaker. Anyone alive to it recognised it as the EU anthem, playing almost exactly ten years on from the Brexit vote. It was probably the most on-the-nose piece of political theatre this country has produced in a while.
I wanted to know what the internet made of all of it. Not the columnists. Not the politicians reading pre-prepared tributes off their phones. The actual people, watching it happen, in real time, on the platforms they already had open.
So I went and read the two places most of the reaction landed. The comment section under one of the big BBC-style news videos on YouTube, where the resignation speech clocked up nearly 2,000 comments in a day. And the r/ukpolitics megathread, which pulled in over 600 comments and pushed several of them past 1,000 upvotes.
What I found was two completely different internets, looking at the same event.
The YouTube comment section, if you scroll it end-to-end, is a wake with the mood of a leaving do nobody wanted to be quiet at.
The single highest-liked comment, on 421, was this:
“I heard a loud cheer, I thought England had won the world cup.”
Just behind it: “The great British circus continues.” “May the next useless PM please stand up.” “We shall now replace the VHS player with a VHS player.” “Talking bullsh*t to the very end.”
It is line after line of that. Short. Cutting. Occasionally very funny. Rarely more than a sentence long. Of nearly two thousand comments, I counted four with any real length or working-out to them.
The Ode to Joy came up a lot. “Is he being trolled with Ode to Joy? Who is blasting that?” “Ode to Joy in the background. You couldn’t make it up.” Nobody was there for the symbolism, but they clocked it and enjoyed it.
There is anger in there too. Anger about immigration, about “two-tier” policing, about digital ID, about Mandelson, about Winter Fuel. There is a lot of Reform and a lot of Farage. But almost all of it, angry or amused, comes in the same shape: a one-line verdict, drop it, scroll on. The comments do not talk to each other. They talk over each other, at the same person, all agreeing that he was awful, and moving on.
If you were told nothing else about the resignation and read only this comment section, you would come away certain of one thing. Britain hated Keir Starmer, was glad to see the back of him, and could not wait for the next one.
Then you go to Reddit.
r/ukpolitics is not a soft crowd for Labour. It has a well-earned reputation for being sceptical of the government, sharp with its critique, and quicker than most subs to spot spin. If any corner of the British internet was going to pile on with the YouTube commenters, it was this one.
It didn’t.
The single highest-upvoted comment in the thread, on 2,322 points, sets up the whole argument the rest of the sub then has with itself:
“You can now show us the magic ‘fix country’ button Andy. Keir was just too stupid to press it. I give him six months before Labour are back where they are now in the polls.”
That is not a defence of Starmer. It is a shrug at the idea that removing him is the answer to anything. And it is the frame that almost every top comment underneath it inherits.
Second place, on 1,599: “Could he have done better? Yes. Was he the worst PM? No he wasn’t at all. Labour MPs and the media have a lot of answer for.”
Third, on 933, one line: “Anyone else here just kinda tired at this point?”
Then, in various forms, the same argument stacked ten deep: he wasn’t great, he was fine, he was fine enough, the party undermined him, the press hunted him, the electorate wanted a magic fix and won’t get one from anyone.
One user, on 609 upvotes, opened with “I’m not a Labour supporter or voter” before calling Starmer “a good and decent man trying to fix a clusterf*ck that has been 14 years in the making.” Another, on 392: “If even a man as bland as that can be painted as a devil, nobody will last as PM ever again.” A third, on 222, laid out what a good chunk of the thread seemed to actually want from a Prime Minister:
“I don’t want a charismatic PM. Boris was charismatic. Truss was insane. Starmer just seemed largely decent, dependable, perhaps a little dull. That’s what you want on the world stage after all the madness that came before. Whyyyyy.”
One user summed it up with the kind of bemused observation that only lands after you’ve read the whole thread: “Never seen as much support for Keir Starmer than in this comment section, wtf.”
The critical voices are in there. Mandelson comes up a lot. So do the Winter Fuel Allowance climbdown, digital ID, the online safety act, the abandoned trans rights positions, and the appointment scandal. One comment, on 169: “Knowingly appointing the accomplice of an international sex trafficker to one of the most important posts in government was 100% a sackable offence.” Another simply: “He was a sh*t PM.”
But they are not the top of the thread. They are the second and third and fourth voice in the argument, not the first. On Reddit, on this day, the loudest voice wasn’t the one shouting good riddance. It was the one saying, hang on, this isn’t going to work.
The most interesting thread inside the r/ukpolitics thread has almost nothing to do with the man resigning.
It’s about Britain.
“We are a deeply unserious country. Almost ten years to the day since Brexit and it’s been one mess after another,” writes one user, on 158.
“How the f*ck can we get stability if we keep turning over leaders like football managers?” asks another, on 136.
“I feel like we’ll never have a stable government ever again honestly,” on 321.
“A mediocre PM serving a full term would have been far less damaging than Britain’s endless cycle of leaders being pushed out before they’ve had time to govern.” That one on 210.
And this, on 194, which is close to the point the thread keeps arriving at from different directions:
“I think the electorate deserves some blame also. It is impatient, naive and gullible. We need a cultural shift.”
You do not get that on YouTube. You get “good riddance” on YouTube. Whatever you make of the politics, the thing r/ukpolitics is doing that the video comments are not is turning the criticism inward as well as outward. Blaming the press, yes. Blaming the party, yes. But also blaming us. The voters, the country, the “cycle we keep expecting a different outcome from” as one user put it.
There’s a small side-thread I keep coming back to.
It’s about the person playing Ode to Joy outside Downing Street. On YouTube he is a hero, a punchline, or invisible. On r/ukpolitics, one comment gets 179 upvotes for saying this:
“I hate the person playing the music during all these big announcements. Could we, for the love of god, grow up as a country. The person who gives up a huge chunk of their lives to help others, both Keir and Rishi, have to try and speak over the moron with the speaker. I didn’t like Keir’s policies but I respect someone trying to help others and do their best.”
Someone else adds context, on 35 points: it was Steve Bray, the anti-Brexit man from Parliament Square. Ode to Joy is the EU anthem.
Read the two comments together and you get a compressed version of the whole difference between the two platforms. On one, the moment is a meme. On the other, the moment is a meme and a small national embarrassment and a question about how the country conducts itself, all at once, all in about eighty words.
Nobody on either platform thinks the change is going to fix anything. That is the one place YouTube and Reddit strongly agree.
The most upvoted Burnham comment on r/ukpolitics, on 642: “Burnham (let’s be honest here he’s going to win) is going to have to deal with the same sh*t Starmer did. See you in six months.”
Another, on 280, offers a full timeline. “Within two weeks of being PM we will have a Burnham accepted donations controversy. Within two months I expect Rayner to attempt to undermine him. Within four months I expect a few resignations or people being kicked out for corruption or tax evasion again.”
Another, on 164, cuts the reasoning to five words: “What rhymes with Burnham?”
Followed, on 137, by the joke everyone was going to make eventually: “‘Burn him down’ says one MP, Daily Mail, 2027.”
That gag would work on YouTube too. What it wouldn’t be is the second-to-top comment in a serious political thread, in a subreddit not known for its jokes, sitting under a genuine argument about media accountability. On r/ukpolitics, the joke and the argument share the room.
That depends entirely on which internet you were reading.
On the algorithm-served YouTube feed under a news video, Starmer was gone, good, next. The comment section reads as one long roar of tribal, one-line agreement, occasionally very funny, occasionally very ugly, rarely paused for a second thought.
On r/ukpolitics, a place people have to actively choose to go to and where every comment is voted up or down by people who’ve clicked into a thread deliberately, the tone was slower, sadder, more self-critical, more forgiving of Starmer than most of his own party turned out to be, and openly worried about what comes next. Reddit had second thoughts. YouTube didn’t have a first.
The best line I read on either platform, on r/ukpolitics with 106 upvotes, was somebody halfway down the thread noticing the same thing I’d just noticed:
“Never seen as much support for Keir Starmer than in this comment section, wtf.”
Same day. Same resignation. Same country. Two completely different verdicts, from two completely different rooms.
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