In July 2024, Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street on the back of a landslide that felt, at the time, like a collective exhale. Fourteen years of Conservative chaos - austerity, Brexit, a parade of prime ministers who each managed to be worse than the last - and then Labour, with a majority of 172 seats and the enormous, accumulated hope of a country that was simply exhausted by the alternative.

But it has not gone well.

By the end of 2025, Starmer’s approval rating had collapsed to a net favourability of minus 57 - a number matched only by Liz Truss at her most catastrophic. In May’s local elections, Labour lost close to 1,500 council seats in a single night, including Wales, where the party had governed for 27 years. Reform UK - Nigel Farage’s hard-right insurgency - swept into working-class areas that had voted Labour for generations. By mid-May, close to 100 Labour MPs were publicly calling for Starmer to resign or set a timetable for leaving. Then on Thursday last week, Andy Burnham - the Greater Manchester mayor many Labour members regard as the leader they were actually waiting for - won a by-election that cleared his path to a formal challenge.

By Saturday night, reports emerged that Starmer had spent the weekend at his country residence concluding that his position was no longer tenable, and that a statement was expected Monday. This morning, Starmer announced he is stepping down as the leader of the governing Labour Party, and will remain caretaker prime minister until a new leader is chosen in the next few weeks. He becomes the sixth British Prime Minister to resign rather than lose at an election in the last ten years. 

The chart of the United Kingdom has its North Node in Aries. The North Node is the soul’s direction: not where you’ve been, but where you’ve always been meant to go, the thing you keep circling without quite choosing. Britain’s North Node in Aries points toward sovereign courage. Not managed consensus. Not a coalition held together through caution and triangulation and the careful avoidance of anything too decisive. Aries demands action - to stand for something clear enough that people know what you stand for. Lead from the front and let the chips fall. That has not been Starmer’s gift, and nor has it been his government’s story.

As this week began, transit Saturn arrived at Britain’s natal North Node - consequence and destiny arriving at the same address simultaneously. The weight of what the country has chosen, and the weight of what it has not yet been willing to choose, standing on the same street corner. Saturn doesn’t arrive to punish - it arrives to make the path forward unavoidable. When you can no longer hold the position you’re in, you are compelled toward where you were always meant to go. That’s what this week carries for Britain.

At the same time, Pluto in Aquarius is opposing Britain’s natal Jupiter in Leo in the 10th house - the national sense of grandeur, of leadership at its most elevated, of the story the country holds of what it can be at its best. Pluto arriving from the sign of the collective says: that version of greatness - organised around a single careful figurehead, a party brand, a promise that one competent administrator could hold the whole thing together - is being composted. Not this leader specifically, but the entire paradigm that produced him.

And alongside that, Neptune in Aries is forming a trine to Britain’s natal Chiron in Sagittarius: the wound in the national story, in the meaning Britain makes of itself. Neptune trine Chiron is not a shattering - it’s more of a gentle dissolving. The story that has been hurting the country - the one that says progress is slow and incremental, that the only alternative to chaos is managed decline, that safety requires you to stand for as little as possible - is being softly, slowly released. What remains when the fog clears will be truer than what it replaced.

What the sky is showing this week is not one leader falling, but a country arriving, at last, at a question it has been circling for years: what does Britain actually stand for? Not as a brand, or a coalition calculation, but as a living thing with a soul’s direction. Britain’s North Node in Aries has been waiting for Britain to decide it is willing to act from courage rather than fear. That choice doesn’t come pre-made with whoever steps forward next. It arrives as the question the country must now answer without the old architecture to hide inside.

For Starmer personally, the sky this week is precise and unsparing. Pluto has been bearing down on his natal Saturn for months - the signature of institutional authority being composted from the inside out. Not a sudden fall, just a structure that can no longer hold its own shape. This transit has been the architecture of his entire final chapter in office.

Today, Mars opposes his natal Venus - the hand forced quietly before it’s shown publicly - while Venus sits on his natal North Node, the path he was always meant to grow into. His North Node in Leo points toward something he hasn’t yet become: genuine leadership from the heart, visible and generous and undefended. Not administration, or the careful management of the possible, but the actual real thing.  

The door closing this week is not only loss, it's just something being cleared. What that makes possible - for Starmer, if he's willing, and for the country, when it finds the courage - is the version of Britain the sky always pointed toward.