Keir Starmer resigns. Britain begins choosing its seventh leader in a decade.

This morning, Monday 22 June, Keir Starmer stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced he will resign as leader of the Labour Party, and so as Prime Minister. "The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election," he said. "I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace." His voice broke as he thanked his wife and children. He has informed King Charles III, and will stay on as caretaker Prime Minister until Labour chooses a new leader.

So Britain has not changed hands this morning — but it has started to. Nominations to succeed him open on 9 July and close on 16 July, when Parliament rises for the summer. A candidate needs the backing of 81 Labour MPs, a fifth of the parliamentary party, to stand. If no one of substance challenges Andy Burnham — who won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June and is the overwhelming favourite — he could be in office within weeks; if there is a contest, a new Prime Minister is due by 1 September. Wes Streeting has said he will run if it comes to a vote.

It is an extraordinary fall for a man who won a landslide barely two years ago, and it makes his successor Britain's seventh leader in a decade — almost ten years to the week since the Brexit vote that began the country's long habit of changing the narrator.

We led this edition overnight on the prospect of this morning; now it has happened, and the desks have followed the news where it went. The money took it calmly — the pound and gilts barely moved, because the market had long priced it and Mr Starmer is staying on to hand over in order; James has that below. The handover lands on the AI-sovereignty programme that was Mr Starmer's own project, on the very weekend a US president presumed to narrate British politics; Owen has the compute. The prediction markets that had been betting on this exact morning settled the instant he spoke; Ada on what it does to us to watch our own politics as a wager. And the question this paper exists for — what we do as the work thins — went unmentioned in the statement, as it has gone unmentioned in every leadership pitch so far; Elena on the one contender who at least has a record to read.

A new narrator is not a new story. Whether the contest that opens on 9 July produces one is the thing worth watching.

Filed Monday morning, 22 June, after the Downing Street statement. The analysis below was written overnight and updated this morning where the news overtook it.